Please stop.
Hermes of Language Learning
He tells you jokes in tongues just outside of your grasp, giggles when you ask him to translate them. He perches over your shoulder as you read books in languages you don’t fully understand yet, offering dictionaries and a native’s knowledge when your brain trips on words and phrases you don’t quite know. When you get angry and words pour from your lips choppily, swearing and cursing even though your accent is not quite perfect, he laughs in delight.
When you finally interpret a conversation or translate that word you’ve been forgetting time and time again, he stands by your side with pride. When you finally hold a conversation with someone without having to resort to your native language, he beams with joy. When you watch a film with your newly found fluency, he sits there and watches with you, sharing in your happiness.
And when life gets hard, he whispers to you in languages you know as intimately as your own body, languages which have carved themselves into your muscle memory and scorched themselves into your bones.
Because sometimes, your native language isn’t the one that comforts you at all.
i saw a really cool butterfly expert man on PBS and was so in awe of him and his butterfly knowledge i tracked down the episode online to see how to spell his name and found his twitter and followed him, only for the next day to awaken to him having read not only my webcomic, but also my livetweets saying how i wanted to marry the butterfly man. he said he was flattered. anyway the moral of the story is please don’t underestimate how far down your twitter a bored entomologist will scroll, and also the internet was a mistake.
Five dragons
1. A small black dragon which has made its home in an oven. It has disconnected the element, using the electricity supply instead to charge its phone. When it sees something being put into the oven, it breathes what it believes to be a sufficient amount of fire over it, then takes a small portion to eat. It spent a long time finding a person who was careless enough about pizza for this plan to work.
2. Large, sleepy grey dragon, frequently mistaken for a hill. Bad habit of falling asleep near cities, getting classified as a prime brownfield site with excellent redevelopment potential, and waking up covered in housing estate. It is a compassionate sort of beast and usually sends a letter round the houses informing everyone when it is going to be travelling and where to before it takes off.
3. A bright green dragon which is afraid of the dark. In recent years it has invested in a metal suit and some bolt-on engine cases, allowing it to pretend to be an aircraft so that it can travel by day. There have been a few misunderstandings at major airports, particularly when its tail number goes unrecognised. It may or may not have eaten six pilots, a catering truck and a Russian spyplane. If you meet it, never mention the fuelling incident.
4. A dragon that scoops up water from the Thames into its supernumerary pouch each morning. Throughout the day it uses its body heat to convert the water to steam, allowing it to wander around above London all day disguised as a small cloud. It is on the lookout for Shakespeare, although it would settle for Marlowe. It has a really great idea for a sequel to The Tempest. None of the booksellers and thespians it has approached have quite had the heart to tell it that humans do not come out of hibernation.
5. A long, gold-and-bronze dragon that is engaged in digging the secret tunnels of the Beijing metro. It has been quite some work to make sure that the secret tunnels interact only minimally with the public ones. But otherwise how would dragons travel under the city unnoticed? The dragon metro only runs at midnight, but when it does then all the clocks of the forbidden city set to chiming and one can see red lights glinting through drain covers. The stations are disguised as tower blocks. Sometimes they fill up with dragons who are waiting for the smog to fall before they fly, and then the windows glow with colours that one can never quite afterwards remember.
What I Thought Being a Witch was Like: Rituals every full moon, mad divination powers and seeing the future, communing with crystals, one with the energy of the universe, brewing potions and making mad magic
What Being a Witch is Actually Like: Drawing sigils to pass tests, asking tarot why I’m anxious and it not telling me, research, random spices on random foods, salt everywhere, stuffing leaves into bottles and hoping it works
The Carving Witch 