they cannot smile or grin or laugh or cut

I went to see the final Hobbit movie last night, and enjoyed it despite truckloads of filler.
Here in NZ the movie was prefaced by a ten-minute short featuring the actors and producers thanking New Zealand and Kiwis for being so damn awesome, a sentiment I wholeheartedly share.

So here's a poem from Goblin Fruit to celebrate, Kites, by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

She drags the dragon through the setting sun.
It parts the orange ocean with its claws.
There is no string. She wields the beast, the run
of tail over the water silk, by caw:
a song to summon spirits from the dirt.
Her voice stampedes the murmur of black veins
that plead us please fill raw this earth.
With shivering gold wings, the dragon tames
a brewing war stuck deep in belly's gut.
Silent are all who watch her trick the wind.
They cannot smile or grin or laugh or cut
a word from blocks of words or mend
their longing to fly high as kites. They puff
their pipes while she, so far from them, smokes night.

Jerusalem is ours as much as yours...

Hey..remember that postgame angsty Malik fic I wrote four years ago? Well, it has a sequel! Two sequels in fact. I've been waiting to write this fic every since I read about the siege of Jerusalem a few months after the events of the first game. It has swordfights! Saladin! Sarcasm! Multiple historical inaccuracies! God I still love this fandom.

Here's the original..Length of God's Patience, sixteen thousand words of post-game Assassin angst featuring everyone's favorite one-armed Assassin.

Title: The Length of God's Patience
Rating; PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers and violence
Summary: Malik struggles with the loss of his arm and his new position as head of the Jerusalem Assassin's Bureau

Your presence here deprives me of both...

Here's the first sequel; The Subject Tonight is Love, the start of a much longer fic that kept heading off in another direction entirely. Five thousand words of conversation and innuendo. Malik/OFC.

Title: The Subject Tonight is Love
Rating: PG
Warnings: Nothing more alarming than the word 'prostitute'
Summary: Takes place immediately after LOGP. The Assassin's Creed doesn't cover every situation in which Malik finds himself.

Your Jerusalem must be a very lonely place...

And the second sequel: A Thousand Days, a novella length and very much in progress adventure story inspired by my discovery that the siege of Jerusalem happened only months after the ending of the game.

Title: A Thousand Days
Rating: 15
Warnings: Violence and historical inaccuracies.
Summary:Post-game. The Order is in disarray following Al Mualim's death. Saladin has retreated to Jerusalem as the Crusaders sweep across the Holy Land. As the Order's foothold in the city grown more precarious by the day, Malik al-Sayf, rafiq of Jerusalem, recieves an unwelcome message from the Assassins of Alamut.

Jerusalem is ours as much as yours...

Have fun. I'll be over here trying to convince myself that writing fan-fiction for a game released seven years ago is retro rather than sad.