Will I live to face another day?

Hakan Anapa of the balance of eternity
What am I but just a fractured dark humanity
A faceless halo filled with nothing and hypocrisy
A ripple's ripple on the murky pond of memory

NOW
HOW
CAN I HOLD

Of how tough
Of a stuff
Am I rolled?

How long (how strong)
Will it take (is my make)
Before I keel over and break

Till my shards
Fill the sky
In the cold?

Although I may be capable of pressuring my cheeks to turn
The space around my heartless void is twinging like an acid burn
As much as everyone may try to tell me everything's okay
Will I live? Will I live to face another day?

The day
is greyer than the Nile on a clouded day
The rain
is rain-like as it comes down on the outer bay

I spread my wings into the chasm just outside the gate
I stare out into the unfeatured dark expanse of fate

BUT
WHAT
IS MY GOAL?

Do I know
How to grow
To my role?

How far (from subpar)
Can I strain (through the rain)
Before I join the aether again

How far
Can I tote
This great hole?

I cannot know the meaning of the feelings known as joy or dread
I only know the spacious space that somehow occupies my head
Just ask me if the air is nice, if starlight fills my heart with glee
And I can only answer that it feels like a day to me

The blackness changes to an aura of a shifting type
Some airlike currents whistle windlike through the ceiling pipe
My ears flick upward as the vapours twist uneasily
I climb the dais as the restless aether calls to me

WHY
WHEREBY
DOES IT RING?

Is there purpose
Inside
Of nothing?

How deep (or how steep)
Can I reach (can I breach)
In this void immersed in black bleach

Till I find
The one source
Of this ding?

I know that half of what I think is likely just hyperbole
But it simply doesn't feel right that everything's the same to me
The blackish void the airish air the doorish door that leads nowhere
How can I even stand here in this state-like state of disrepair?

Hakan Anapa of the balance of eternity
What am I but just a fractured dark humanity
A faceless halo filled with nothing and hypocrisy
A ripple's ripple on the murky pond of memory

I cannot know the meaning of the feelings known as joy or dread
I only know the spacious space that somehow occupies my head
Just ask me if the air is nice, if starlight fills my heart with glee
And I can only answer that it feels like a day to me

Hakan Anapa of the balance of eternity
What am I but just a shadow of an entity?
A nameless figure cloaked in meaningless mythology
A shadow's shadow on the shaky tides of history

Although I may be capable of pressuring my cheeks to turn
The space around my heartless void is twinging like an acid burn
As much as everyone may try to tell me everything's okay
Will I live? Will I live to face another day?

Hakan Anapa of the balance of eternity
Help me rise above this empty state of tragedy
Show me how to bind my fractures for solidity
Give me strength to salt my shrivelling identity

NOW
HOW
CAN I HOLD

Of how tough
Of a stuff
Am I rolled?

How long (how strong)
Will it take (is my make)
Before I keel over and break

Till my shards
Fill the sky
In the cold?

I cannot know the meaning of Ma'at for all my fatal flaws
How can I wield the scale of Anapa in unworthy paws
If I could only know why people press through day and night and troubled air
Would I be worth my aethereal weight in decent-quality Ammut fare?

The blackish void the airish air the doorish door that leads nowhere
How can I even stand here in this state-like state of disrepair?
As much as everyone may try to tell me everything's okay

Will I live?
Will I live to face another day?

Stablehand: Aethereal trio revamp

I kind of got around to revamping these guys, at least partially. I decided that all three of them should have projection-wings to make things consistent, but that all three of the wings should have different styles in order to keep them different from each other.

I still have a little work to do on SH's wings; I think for his overall style I will be leaning a more toward the top picture and kind of like the way I drew the wings there, but I feel like the wings in the bottom picture "fit" better. So maybe they'll end up being a combination of the two or something.

Aiyalam's wings were a pretty random, ad-hoc choice, but I think I'm sticking with that decision.

Stablehand: "Will I live to face another day?" Remix

I finally got around to remixing Stolen Heart's theme. There were two reasons I did it: first, the GM guitar and saxophone I picked sounded HORRIBLE in TiMidity, which is supposed to be a "real" synthesiser, and I couldn't seem to find a version of the MSGS wavetable soundfont I was using where that wasn't the case. Second, the guitar really wasn't the way I wanted it to sound. It took me the longest time to figure out that what I wanted were grace notes, but while I was searching for a guitar that would sound like I was playing grace notes (:p) I found a much better-sounding lead guitar anyway, plus some pretty good background guitars. So I just basically remixed the entire thing.

I think it sounds much better now, so this is the one I'm putting on the Internet Archive page, but I'll leave the old link up on tindeck for now.

(Lyrics are still here.)

Stablehand: Explaining the aethereal trio's weird outfits

I randomly thought about it today, and this is what I came up with:

• Stolen Heart's jackal mask and bladed gloves are kind of like his "business uniform", and thus he wears them whenever he is "at work" but will often take the mask off when he is "off work".
• Arkturuse is enough of a show-off that he probably wears his falcon mask and elaborate formal attire almost all the time. Now, he may have a couple of variations, or not wear a suit all the time, but I can't see him ever intentionally revealing his face to any of his subordinates with the kind of self-esteem problems he has. (The reason he can't see is that he has freaky void-sockets in place of eyes, so his fears about people's reactions may be justified.)
• Aiyalam kind of arbitrarily sometimes wears the mask and sometimes doesn't, though he tends to wear the claw-gloves pretty often. He takes his "job" a lot less seriously than Stolen Heart does, so he tends to act like he's "off work" at random times, regardless of whether his subordinates are working or not, and when he's "taking a break" like this he tends not to wear the mask. However, there will also be times when his subordinates are not working and he's also "taking a break" but yet he's wearing both the mask and the claw-gloves and seems to be plotting his next move or something. He also has a tendency to seem like he's in a normal, fairly non-threatening mood and then abruptly appear in full nightmare mode with the mask and the claws just to startle people. He's kind of weird and unpredictable.

I'm probably going to keep Stolen Heart's tail as part of his design, even though it seems kind of weird, and perhaps give Arkturuse's limbs a little bit of bird-style scaling to match it. I think it might actually fit best if Aiyalam didn't have one, to kind of go along with the way he thinks Stolen Heart and Arkturuse are eccentric idiots and he's the normal one.

Also, another thing I've tentatively decided is that Aiyalam is deaf and instead of trying at all to figure out what people are saying, he just kind of has these hilarious one-sided conversations with himself, mockingly filling in caricatured versions of how he thinks the other person might reply.

How his subordinates could ever stand him I have no idea. Maybe they're equally weird and insane?

Stablehand: Will I live to face another day?

Wow, that's sure a misleading title, isn't it? XD

I'm fine personally. What I have for you is a song about somebody who's a little less than fine. As I said on my tumblr:

Here's a mildly depressing song with a rather funny story behind it.

When I was writing "On the Lift to Ruin", I simply couldn't get enough of Jinfèng's lines, and so I started to write Jinfèng a song of her own. Weeks later when I was in the middle of writing said song I took a moment to laugh at myself and casually think "What am I doing? This is ridiculous. Am I going to write a theme song for Stolen Heart next?".

And then I started to muse on what such a song would sound like, and I had a song pretty much completed within three days. I swear, the silly things ALWAYS get done first and faster. And sometimes even better. XD

The lyrics are here.

1/1/2015 edit: both of these links are outdated. :p

Stablehand: Stolen Heart

Yay, now I actually have something visual to show you for Stablehand. It's a character by the name of Stolen Heart, and you can read a lot more about him on the actual dA page. Click the image to go there.