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rakashavia https://ift.tt/2OVtVYI
1. Nyx starts to learn how to say things with flowers not long after Selena is born. It’s his father that teaches him - together they travel all around Galahd and Ardyn tells him what each plant they come across means in the various different flower languages that he knows. Interspaced with the lessons are stories and anecdotes and adventures - to the point where it takes Nyx several months to realise that they are actually lessons and that he’s learning things instead of just spending time with his dad. Which is pretty par on course actually. Not long after he realises this, he gives his father a bouquet of flowers - one meaning gratitude and happiness and love. Ardyn smiles when he sees it - bright and happy and not haunted by the past in a way that Nyx has hardly ever seen, and he decides that he’ll do anything to put that smile on his father’s face again. (He also starts using flower language for literally everything - including that time he spent several hours searching for the flowers just to tell a boy from his village that he was an idiot - because it made his father smile to see messages written in plants)
2. When Crowe first meets Nyx and Lib, she’s 11 and an orphan and they’re 14 and on their coming-of-age-trip. They quite literally save each other’s lives - Crowe sets a daemon sneaking up on the duo on fire, then kills it with her knife, only for Lib to yank her back from claws that would have killed her and Nyx to kill the daemons surrounding her with lightning. It’s only later, when they’re all sitting around a fire and laughing and joking like they’ve all been friends for years, that she realises that Nyx has been wearing a flower crown the entire time. She doesn’t ask, not then (because battling a pack of daemons together may have made them friends, but she still didn’t totally trust them and she knows that that goes both ways) but she tags along on the trip and learns that Nyx always wore a flower crown - and eventually, months later when she can hardly remember a life without these idiots in it, she learns that the flowers mean determination and vengeance and duty, because that was what Nyx was using his coming-of-age-trip for.
3. Nyx decorates their mother’s pyre in flowers. Selena, as the next head of the Ulric Clan, would be the one to light the pyre – but it was Nyx’s right as her eldest child to make her pyre. He’s silent as he works, face blank and eyes cold – but that’s okay, she only needs to look at the flowers to know what her brother feels. Their mother’s pyre is decorated in flowers that represent grief and lose and a hope for happiness and peace and acceptance into the next life. They spell out a blessing almost as old as the land that they stand on, one that Selena knows that Ardyn had taught her brother years ago. Fire burns those messages and pleas away, and the Lightning that Nyx calls removes all other traces of the body itself, but Selena knows that they were there and that’s enough.
4. After Galahd’s fall, Nyx finds himself speaking in flowers less. The plants in Insomnia are so different to those from home – and while his father had made sure that he could name the meanings of all of them, it just felt different. So, he tones it down a bit – limiting himself to a couple blossoms for good luck or bombarding his family’s phones with pics of flowers. Until some noble, whose name that Nyx knows but choses to conveniently forget, insults his people. If Nyx was any other Galahdian – if he wasn’t raised by his father, wasn’t raised by a King versed in politics and nobility – then he would have retaliated then, because Nyx is a Chosen of Ramuh and his people are his. But Nyx was raised by Ardyn and knows that the best revenge is often a subtle one – he spends hours scouring the flower shops in Insomnia for what they had in stock and ordering a couple different kinds from outside of the city before he presents the bouquet to this noble with a contrite apology for his comments the previous day. It’s a very pretty bouquet, one that looks almost store bought, and Nyx looks so very earnest – so nobody who understands the meanings of the flowers can tell whether Nyx is being truthful or if he just handed a man a bouquet telling them to “take a long walk off a short pier you prejudiced fuckface” with a straight face. (The Galahdians, who know how Nyx is about flowers, cackle about this)
5. There’s a statue of Somnus - of the Founder King, of the ‘first’ of the Lucis Caelum line, of the Mystic – in one of the main courtyards of the Citadel. It’s a pretty ugly statue, surrounded by a few flowers but mostly grass, and nobody really likes it, but they put up with it because of what it is. Still, everybody is pretty happy when someone plants some flowers around the statue – the first summer afterwards when the statue was surrounded by pretty red flowers, everyone agreed it was an improvement. Nyx is just waiting for someone to realise that red dahlia’s mean betrayal. (he might not be able to shout Somnus’ sins from the rooftops, or to tell the Lucians exactly what the man they so revere did to his father, but he can make sure that they at least have chance of knowing him for the traitor that he was)
(Your picture was not posted)
1. Nyx starts to learn how to say things with flowers not long after Selena is born. It’s his father that teaches him - together they travel all around Galahd and Ardyn tells him what each plant they come across means in the various different flower languages that he knows. Interspaced with the lessons are stories and anecdotes and adventures - to the point where it takes Nyx several months to realise that they are actually lessons and that he’s learning things instead of just spending time with his dad. Which is pretty par on course actually. Not long after he realises this, he gives his father a bouquet of flowers - one meaning gratitude and happiness and love. Ardyn smiles when he sees it - bright and happy and not haunted by the past in a way that Nyx has hardly ever seen, and he decides that he’ll do anything to put that smile on his father’s face again. (He also starts using flower language for literally everything - including that time he spent several hours searching for the flowers just to tell a boy from his village that he was an idiot - because it made his father smile to see messages written in plants)
2. When Crowe first meets Nyx and Lib, she’s 11 and an orphan and they’re 14 and on their coming-of-age-trip. They quite literally save each other’s lives - Crowe sets a daemon sneaking up on the duo on fire, then kills it with her knife, only for Lib to yank her back from claws that would have killed her and Nyx to kill the daemons surrounding her with lightning. It’s only later, when they’re all sitting around a fire and laughing and joking like they’ve all been friends for years, that she realises that Nyx has been wearing a flower crown the entire time. She doesn’t ask, not then (because battling a pack of daemons together may have made them friends, but she still didn’t totally trust them and she knows that that goes both ways) but she tags along on the trip and learns that Nyx always wore a flower crown - and eventually, months later when she can hardly remember a life without these idiots in it, she learns that the flowers mean determination and vengeance and duty, because that was what Nyx was using his coming-of-age-trip for.
3. Nyx decorates their mother’s pyre in flowers. Selena, as the next head of the Ulric Clan, would be the one to light the pyre – but it was Nyx’s right as her eldest child to make her pyre. He’s silent as he works, face blank and eyes cold – but that’s okay, she only needs to look at the flowers to know what her brother feels. Their mother’s pyre is decorated in flowers that represent grief and lose and a hope for happiness and peace and acceptance into the next life. They spell out a blessing almost as old as the land that they stand on, one that Selena knows that Ardyn had taught her brother years ago. Fire burns those messages and pleas away, and the Lightning that Nyx calls removes all other traces of the body itself, but Selena knows that they were there and that’s enough.
4. After Galahd’s fall, Nyx finds himself speaking in flowers less. The plants in Insomnia are so different to those from home – and while his father had made sure that he could name the meanings of all of them, it just felt different. So, he tones it down a bit – limiting himself to a couple blossoms for good luck or bombarding his family’s phones with pics of flowers. Until some noble, whose name that Nyx knows but choses to conveniently forget, insults his people. If Nyx was any other Galahdian – if he wasn’t raised by his father, wasn’t raised by a King versed in politics and nobility – then he would have retaliated then, because Nyx is a Chosen of Ramuh and his people are his. But Nyx was raised by Ardyn and knows that the best revenge is often a subtle one – he spends hours scouring the flower shops in Insomnia for what they had in stock and ordering a couple different kinds from outside of the city before he presents the bouquet to this noble with a contrite apology for his comments the previous day. It’s a very pretty bouquet, one that looks almost store bought, and Nyx looks so very earnest – so nobody who understands the meanings of the flowers can tell whether Nyx is being truthful or if he just handed a man a bouquet telling them to “take a long walk off a short pier you prejudiced fuckface” with a straight face. (The Galahdians, who know how Nyx is about flowers, cackle about this)
5. There’s a statue of Somnus - of the Founder King, of the ‘first’ of the Lucis Caelum line, of the Mystic – in one of the main courtyards of the Citadel. It’s a pretty ugly statue, surrounded by a few flowers but mostly grass, and nobody really likes it, but they put up with it because of what it is. Still, everybody is pretty happy when someone plants some flowers around the statue – the first summer afterwards when the statue was surrounded by pretty red flowers, everyone agreed it was an improvement. Nyx is just waiting for someone to realise that red dahlia’s mean betrayal. (he might not be able to shout Somnus’ sins from the rooftops, or to tell the Lucians exactly what the man they so revere did to his father, but he can make sure that they at least have chance of knowing him for the traitor that he was)
(Your picture was not posted)
