Hehe I just wanted to write down my headcanons before I forgot them ;u; Here, have some Sound of Bells trivia~
Fact: John is not a teenager in this fic. He’s around 27, younger than Karkat who’s around 15 sweeps old. That makes an age difference of approximately three years.
Fact: At six sweeps, Feferi came into power as Empress of Alternia. She was originally going to inherit the Imperious Condescension title at her coronation, but refused all titles except Empress until she did something to earn them. Almost immediately after, she was named the Lifebringer and the Good Queen after her first act was to abolish capital punishment or culling for crimes. Hemospectrum prejudice is still being worked on.
Fact: All of Feferi’s closest friends have become lords and ladies (or dames, as Vriska would prefer) and her personal advisors. Some are working for the Empire like Gamzee and Karkat and Terezi, but some have gone their own way and set up businesses, etc. Because of this favouritism and the campaign to abolish hemospectrum discrimination, not everyone is a supporter of her reign.
Fact: This thing was inspired by a book. And because I figure I really want to give credit to how the whole fic was spawned- I was reading Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and these parts near the beginning really struck me.
There is a boy dancing, who in this light is the most desirable thing he has seen. His thin shoulders white as papyrus, light from the fire reflecting sweat on his stomach, nakedness glimpsed through openings in the blue linen he wears as a lure from neck to ankle, revealing himself as a line of brown lightning.
and
And the pure beauty of an innocent dancing boy, like the sound from a boy chorister, which he remembered as the purest of sounds, the clearest river water, the most transparent depth of the sea. Here in the desert, which had been an old sea where nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted- like the shift of linen across the boy as if he were embracing or freeing himself from an ocean or his own blue afterbirth.
Beautiful lines, aren’t they? :)
