Traditional raised Sami storehouse, displayed at Skansen, Stockholm. A similar structure, the izbushka, is mentioned in Russian children stories as a house with chicken feet.
We had to write a Mini Comic for my Illustration Class so I did mine based on The Frog and The Scorpion. Hopefully you all know the story!
But if you don’t know the story… In the original the scorpion stings the frog in the middle of the river. When the frog asks “why” the scorpion says “it’s in my nature” and they both die. I like my ending more.
Done with watercolor and pen and ink nib.
I always thought this story was fucked up, even when I heard it as a very young child. I even got put in the naughty corner, and a star next to my name crossed off for questioning it.
This story is so much better, and I like it’s message much more.
You’re a powerful dragon that lived next to a small kingdom. For centuries you ignored humanity and lived alone in a cave, and the humans also avoided you. As the kingdom fell to invaders, a dying soldier approaches you with the infant princess, begging you to take care of her.
“cool,” you say, picking a bone from your teeth. it’s a power move you saw on VHS, but it actually just makes your gums kind of hurt. feels like ripping a popcorn kernel out.
around you, the abandoned subway is dripping. your horde of slightly-used-but-still-good Items Of Debatable Usage shifts under the scales of your tail.
“so, like, how did you find me, again?” you curl your tail up, around, through the air. the soldier looks bad, but you also don’t want him to die on your rug because you just got that cleaned. it’s really sixty rugs sewn together and to be honest? talk about a cleaning charge. used to be a dragon’s promise was worth something in this world.
you weren’t listening. “then she sent me here to you,” the man is saying.
you curl your tail around a handkerchief and pass it to him to clean up his blood. when it lands on him, you realize you’ve sort of erred. it is not a kerchief. it is a full king-sized sheet that is a replica from the set of the That’s 70′s Show. you’ve never seen an episode.
“she?” you taste the pronoun in your mouth. “let me guess. tall, green-black hair, very like a snake, but like, in a way that feels sort of human. like if a human was being a snake more than if a person was snake-ish.”
the soldier, with his one free arm, is trying to wrap parts of the sheet around his wounds. he barely nods. it’s kind of rude he’s so distracted.
you appraise him. “she didn’t like you,” you say, and hop off the ledge you’re lurking on. you feel graceful usually, but the smallness of this man makes you feel sort of crowded. like if you walk the wrong way you’ll squish him.
he coughs into his hand. the baby is fussing. “she… what? how do you know?”
“sent you the hard way,” you say, “quest and everything.”
you sniff downwards. the baby is absolutely Royalty, capital R. smells like a future princess. smells like hidden-in-a-wood. you smell again. actually, maybe it’s a tower. she smells like a tower princess.
maybe he thinks that you’re gonna eat her, because he wraps her tight against his chest. he smells like not-related, but absolutely sworn-to-protect. ugh.
you swipe your tail. clear off a space, dive in your claw. fish around. pluck out what is not a crib (cribs are useful) but instead a race car bed that has high enough walls it could convince itself to be a crib. “plop her down,” you say, “she’ll be safe here.”
“how do i know?” his voice is scratchy.
“call her,” you say, “call steph.”
he doesn’t move. you roll your eyes. “ugh. is she still going by that name? call The Witch of Night”. a name, which, not that it matters, you suggested to her about six eons ago. now it’s more like “One of the Several Witches Of New York City And Surrounding Boroughs.”
“i trust her,” he says, “i don’t trust you. how do you two even…?”
“she’s punishing me,” you say, because honestly! when is she not! she has no idea what a prank is supposed to look like! “this is to remind me that i belong in a Tale, and i escaped, and it totally ruined a Very Good Spell.”
he’s staring at you. his eyes are glassy. he stumbles. you edge the racecar bed closer. he puts the baby in it and she hushes, which you take to be a good sign. you rock it gently with your tail. if you took care of her (which, you won’t, obviously) you’d have to do some Small Magic and turn human for a while, even though you always feel kind of tiny and weak in human bodies. it would make it easier to hold and carry and take outside this little bundle of joy. no, not joy. Royalty.
“dragons are supposed to die in Tales,” you say, “and i didn’t die, clearly.” you begin to hunt for something that can function as a bottle. “major disappointment for all involved, myself included, trust me.”
the man drops to his knees. you suck in your breath between your teeth. he flinches like he expects flames, which is kind of hurtful. if you had wanted to eat him, you would have just done that already. but really, barbecue in front of a baby? even dragons have morals.
“ugh,” you say, and you pull out your old talking stone you can’t afford (Verizon has great coverage for hidden supernatural beasts, but really, at what cost) “hang on.”
the phone rings about two whole times. your heart always flutters, just a little, because it’s her on the other end. “sophie?” you ask.
“yeah?” her voice holds a smile in it.
“steph sent me another baby,” you say. you meanwhile pull what-is-not-a-rattle out of the pile and shake it for the girl. “the guy who brought it, is, like… toast.”
he looks pale.
“not literal toast,” you amend, “absolutely could be worse.”
“i keep telling her,” sophie sighs, “we’re not ready.”
“she’s just excited,” you say placidly. it’s not good to speak ill of your inlaws.
“how much longer for the guy?”
you sniff. “uh, forty minutes, tops. how fast can you get him to the hospital?”
“oh, twelve with traffic.” in the background, you hear her moving, already on her way, her keys jingling.
“what do we do with … uh Recent Acquisition.” you tickle the baby with a tail. it giggles and it sounds like bells. you roll your eyes. absolutely Royalty, kind-as-kittens, pure-of-heart, some-bullshit-yet-to-be-written. you want to snuggle with her, which is just completely unbecoming of a dragon.
“i’m going to kill her,” sophie says, “what kind of baby?”
“tower princess.” you gently push the man and his blood off your rug. ugh. he’s moaning and groaning, so you tell him, “dude i’m on the phone.”
he’s going to be fine. sophie never met someone she couldn’t heal. she healed up the big old wound that was your heart, after all, cleaned it out and patched it up and made you whole. and she’d done that literally a few times, too. your Day Witch. the dawn star of your heart.
there’s a little laugh. “remember our tower?”
“babe,” you say, “how can i forget.” you look over to the Dying Man on his Final Quest. you offer him a partially-burned cellphone and mouth call who you need to. you need to say it a few times, because he isn’t good at reading dragon lips.
“sorry about steph,” sophie sighs. “she just wants to be an aunt.”
there’s kind of a pause and sophie adds, gently, in a way that your heart breaks to hear, “and maybe …. i kind of told her i wanna be a mom.”
sure, steph is much nicer since six eons ago when she went through a totally-edgy there-can-only-be-one-powerful-twin phase (and really, aren’t we all like that as teenagers), but as an aunt? she’s not like sophie, who is kind and gentle and good and whole and has loved you in any form you choose, who has held your claw when your cried and shined your scales and sorted your Horde and helped you find new bodies and helped you escape a Tale (her Tale too) and who ran off with you and survived, and thrived, and lived in a world that forgot magic, and live, and love, and watch lots of netflix, which, along with vaccines, is your absolute favorite New Era thing.
but anyway. what if steph goes dark again. what if you forget to invite her to the birthday party or it gets lost in the mail and lo and behold, eternal sleep. what if she don’t like how the baby speaks and decides Toads For Tongues. what if she goes through the whole mirror-mirror bullshit. not with your baby.
your baby. is this, like, your baby now?
“i kinda,” the words feel so Right. like Tale kinds of Right. like somehow when he showed up he wasn’t finishing his quest but starting yours. the baby laughs again and you realize: she doesn’t sound like bells. she sounds normal, you just already love her, “i kinda wanna be a mom too.”
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
When I posted the first Elsewhere University comic, I had no idea what it was going to turn into over the following months. The community that’s grown out of it – the stories and art and obscure bits of folklore and science, the fortunetelling asks and vague anon prophecies, all of it building on itself and branching into places that still manage to take me by surprise – has created a weirder and more wonderful world than anything I could have imagined. This comic is meant as a celebration of everything that’s grown out of the stories set in Elsewhere, and an expression of gratitude. I wasn’t even close to being able to include everything; the Library alone would need a dozen pages. For those whose works I did include, I dearly hope I did them justice. Words can’t express what this world and community have grown to mean to me, but I hope this comes close. Thank you so much, all of you. Keep making amazing things.
All works referenced below the cut, if you want to learn more about them!
so if there’s one single trope i’m always down to fight it’s the animal bride (folklore motif 402??) which a lot of you are probably familiar with as the selkie – the fisherman either falls in love, steals her skin to trap her on land/gain power over her, or they fall in love and THEN he steals her skin to keep her from leaving, and either way she spends a lot of time gazing sadly out to sea and then she or her child finds the skin and never returns again. and that’s awful on a whole lot of levels – it’s not love, it’s control.
BUT. but the thing is. you how selkies/seal women was a pretty common variation of this? another really popular one was swans.
i just want you to think about that for a moment. swans. like…I get it, they’re pretty, graceful birds, certainly it’s easy to imagine them magically becoming pretty graceful ladies? but have you ever fought a swan. swans are awful. swans are the devil’s geese. imagine seeing a pretty magic lady and being absolutely enchanted by her, and stealing her magic feather cloak, and then you go up and say ‘hey i’m in love with you, let me make you my queen, it will be great, we’ll be so happy’ and she just looks at you for a moment and…
you know i was going to say maybe she just shouts for her sisters and suddenly you’rerealizing you’ve made a terrible terrible mistake bc you’re surrounded by big fucking birds who are all hissing. but honestly if this swan lady is as aggressively down to brawl as any other generally unhappy swan, then she’d straight up fuck you up on her own. she’d just deck you roundhouse, honestly. you don’t fuck with swans. why does this trope exist
okay but consider this: a woman walks to the park every day and feeds the swans and watches them paddle gracefully around the lake, sighing to see how beautifully they swim.
finally one day, a swan comes up to her and says ‘why don’t you come and swim with us? you always sigh so wistfully to see us on the water, and you would be most welcome to join our company, for you have always been a true friend to our kind’
and the woman says, ‘i can’t swim’
and the swan says, ‘we’ll teach you’
and the woman says, ‘literally i can’t swim, my husband stole my sealskin and should i venture into deep water i would surely drown’
and the swan says ‘your husband fucking WHAT’
the next morning the woman’s front yard looks like this.
and neither the woman nor her husband are ever heard from again, though for very different reasons.
It may also interest someone to know that swans can projectile poop.
I know a real-world mama swan who got shot in the wing and walked four miles overland to get back to her babies and dad swan, with her broken wing bleeding and dragging the whole way. She just kept going. Don’t mess with lady swans.
Also? Swans don’t have a lot of obvious physical markings that divide the males from females. So some idiot might be like, “damn, that’s a sexy bird, I wanna marry her” and then like. It’s a dude swan. You just transformed thirty pounds of angry aggressive bird into 200+ pounds of angry aggressive adult man, who will totally kick your butt. (Also I’m pretty sure that if you turned a lady swan into a human, you would not get a willowy little 5′0″ girl. You’d probably have a 6-foot amazon with biceps the size of your head. Swans are heavy birds and it takes a LOT of muscle to get them into the air. They are among the baddest bitches in the bird kingdom)
And when a swan decides to beat you up, it is not with fancy martial arts. Swans are brawlers. They have bone clubs built into their wing joints specifically for beating people up. A human swan is gonna come at you screaming and spitting and just keep punching you in the face until you regret every decision you have made ever in your life and also some of the ones your parents made too.
I want a movie where the swan is either played by The Rock or Gwendoline Christie and the screaming brawls are the centerpiece.
The sorcerer’s eyes scan the lake greedily. He’s been coming here for months, dreaming. Waiting.
Choosing.
And now it’s time.
“That one,” he tells the two men he hired earlier this morning, pointing one long, ring-adorned finger at the most beautiful swan. “Bring her to me.”
The henchmen don’t ask questions. He paid them specifically so they wouldn’t ask questions.
Even so, henchmen A glances at henchman B from the corner of his eye.
“Dude,” he says when they’re far enough way from the cackling sorcerer that they won’t be overheard, “why the hell does he want a swan?”
Henchman B shrugs. “What do these sorcerer types ever want?”
They near the water’s edge. “Okay, but,” Henchman A says, “he’s not going to try and fuck it, right? Because I’m sort of uncomfortable with beastiality–”
“Oh my god,” henchman B groans. “Just grab the swan.”
It takes a bit of cursing, flailing, and begrudging team work to grab the swan. When they finally manage to tuck her wings against her sides and grab hold of her neck to prevent her from biting she goes limp, making the strangest, saddest sound that the henchmen have ever heard.
“It’s okay,” Henchman A tells her bracingly, feet squelching as they haul her from the muddy lake’s edge to the sorcerer. “He’s probably not into beastiality. Very few people are.”
Henchmen B coughs and averts his eyes. “Uh, yeah. Right. Hey, you don’t think this was too easy? I mean, the other swans are just…watching. Us.”
Henchman A glances over his shoulder. Sure enough, floating on the lake are about two dozen swans, all curving their elegant necks so they can watch the fate of the swan hanging in between them. Rather than seeming alarmed, they seem…amused?
Henchman A looks away. “Nah, I’m sure it’s fine.”
The sorcerer jumps from foot to foot when they approach, clapping his hands together. “Good, good! Now just hold her there, hold her!”
The henchmen watch as the sorcerer visibly reigns himself in, breathing deeply. He begins to mutter in tongues for a very long time, an awkwardly long time. The henchmen glance at each other with their eyebrows raised. Sorcerers, man.
Suddenly the sorcerer’s head snaps up, eyes glowing a blazing black. He points his bejeweled finger at the swan who has remained suspiciously limp between them and hisses a short, ominous phrase.
Henchman A fights not to scream as a bolt of blue lightning flies at them. Henchman B drops his side of the swan and Henchman A follows suit just in time. The bolt strikes the swan and there’s a blinding flash as the sorcerer begins to cackle again.
“Behold!” he screams to the sky. “My bride!”
The spots clear from the henchmen’s eyes and they gape at the swan. Or rather where the swan should be. Instead there’s a woman there, crumpled on the ground, in a white, soft dress that’s already muddy.
She slowly lifts her head, her face pointed towards Henchman A. Her eyes snap open to reveal a swan’s eyes, a deep unending black that looks… not right on a human.
“Oh what the fuck,” Henchman A says.
The swan woman levers herself up. And up. And up. And up until she towers over them. There are thick cords of muscle at eye level, thick arms and a broad chest that lead to a very strong neck . Most of her body is hidden by her dress, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess that she’s built like a fucking tank.
She is very, very swan-like, henchman A realizes.
“Oh what the fuck,” henchman B says.
The woman smiles, showing off white, small teeth. “Welcome to the thunderdome, gentleman.”
Her fist feels like steel when it connects with Henchman A’s face and he thinks he hears his cheek break. He falls to the ground hard and doesn’t even try to stay conscious after a hit like that. The last thing he hears is what sounds like laughter from the direction of the lake.
Henchman B tries to run, but the swan woman is fast. She grabs the back of his collar and slings him to the ground, hissing and spitting. She hikes up her dress, showing built calves, and brings her heel slicing down onto his stomach. He reaches and chokes at the same time, moving belatedly to cover his head.
He needn’t bother. The swan woman seems to be done with him.
The sorcerer’s still standing in the spot from which he cast the spell, mouth agape. “B-but, you– you’re a swan? Wha–”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the swan woman says. Her voice is scratchy and growls like she’s swallowed glass. It sounds a bit like the hissing merriment happening on the lake. “I’m not a swan. I’m your wife.” She cracks her knuckles. “And it’s time for our honeymoon.”
The sorcerer picks up his robes and flees into the forest. The swan woman is fine with that. The swan who’d had to deal with this last week said that its more fun when they run.
She’s not surprised to find that he’s right.
OH MY GOD.
IT GOT BETTER.
Okay, okay, but what about when it goes the other way? A gander once fell in love with my father and followed him around boop-ooping in the most adorable way. This gander was a fierce warrior who bit everyone else (except my sister who BIT HIM BACK) but he just up and decided that Dad was his true love. This often happens a LOT with birds, especially flock birds like geese, ducks, and swans.
So what does the wizard do when a swan comes to him wanting to be turned into a human? Does he summon his daughters to help her dress and makeup? Does his wife give her tips on seducing men? Cu.z heaven help her if she gets advice from a giant nerd like a wizard
“But I thought wizards were supposed to know everything!” the swan woman protested. “Nope!” The wizard replied cheerfully. “We get a pass on all the humanities at Uni so we aren’t distracted by unnecessary human interaction. The best I can tell you is that usually when I send folks off to get something they have to kill a dragon or save a princess or something. So go impress the object of your affections with grand deeds I guess!”
So swan woman goes off to woo her chosen, flexing her biceps thoughtfully as she went.
So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve? And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before? And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling? And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air? Allow me to explain:
The totally awesome elaborate backstory that explains Beauty and the Beast
Once upon a time there was a king, a queen, and their only son
But while the prince was still in his infancy, in a neat reversal of how these fairy tales usually go, the king tragically died, leaving his wife to act as Regent until their son reaches maturity
Unfortunately, the rulers of all the lands surrounding them go, “Hmm, the kingdom is ruled by a woman now, it must be weak, time for an invasion!”
And the Queen goes, “Well, if I let some general fight all these battles for me, he’ll totally amass enough fame and power to make a bid for the throne; if I want to protect my son’s crown, I have no choice but to take up arms and lead the troops myself!”
(Btw, I want to stress that this woman is not Eowyn or Boudica and nothing in the way her story is presented suggests that she had any interest martial exploits before or in any way came to enjoy them during these battles. This is a perfectly ordinary court lady who would much rather be embroidering altar covers for the royal chapel and playing with her child until necessity made her go, “Oh no, this sucks, I guess I have to become a Warrior Queen now” and she just happened to kick ass at it anyway.)
And the Queen totally kicked ass, but the whole “twice as good for half the credit” thing meant that no matter how many battles she won, potential enemies refused to take her and her army seriously until she had defeated them so no sooner would she fend off one invasion than another one would pop up on a different border.
So she spent the majority of her young son’s life away from the castle leading armies, but it was OK because she left him in the care of her two best friends, who just happen to be fairies! This was an awesome idea because a) fairies have magic, and therefore are like the best people to protect the prince from any threats and b) fairies consider themselves to be so above humanity that the lowest fairy outranks the highest mortal, so they’d have no interest in taking a human throne. Good thing they were both good fairies instead of one good and one evil one!
(Spoiler: they were not both good fairies.)
So the two fairies basically take turns raising the prince until he’s old enough to rule. And on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, the evil older one comes into the prince’s bedroom.
“So listen, kid. You’re about to become king, your mother’s on her way home from the war to see you crowned, and I have a third piece of good news for you! You see, I’ve actually been spending so much time here lately because Fairyland’s become a bit too hot to hold me for reasons totally not related to me being secretly evil. And if I have to hang in the human world, I might as well reside in the upper echelons of it, so even though as a powerful fairy I completely eclipse your puny human status in a staggeringly unimaginable way, since you’re about to be king and since my premonition that I should stick this whole guardianship thing out because you would be hot one day has totally proved accurate (go me), I will graciously lower myself to allowing you to marry me. Please feel free to grovel at my feet in gratitude. (Btw, we can totally start the wedding night now, we’ll tell your mother about it when she arrives tomorrow.)”
Steel Phoenix Studios 