Heavenly Art from Heavenly Eros

Stepping back into the shrunken Mass Effect fandom, in which the Saren/Nihlus ship has always been a niche that is now kept afloat by literally a handful of unrelenting enthusiasts, I did not expect to find a new friend and creative ally (Sixtus), let alone two!

HeavenlyEros descended among us just as I came back from the summer hiatus and stirred the sleepy turian community into a state of cheerful excitement by showering us with art of unearthly beauty.

A New Mass Effect Fic: Bejeweled

In which Saren allows Nihlus to explore his jewelry box and an obscure corner of his internal world.

Inspired by another wonderful artwork by my dear friend, Sixtus, titled Kiss.

Read Bejeweled here, or on AO3, or on FFN. Hope you’ll enjoy!

On a Summer Break

Till mid-august. See you in a month!

A New Mass Effect Fic: Staccato

In which Saren and Nihlus meet for the first time after Saren’s arm has been replaced by a geth prosthetic.

Inspired by the beautiful drawing, Like This, and dedicated to its author and my friend, Sixtus.

Read Staccato here, or on AO3. Hope you’ll enjoy!

Ghostly & Hypnotic

I just can’t get over this image. It’s been sitting in one of my browser tabs for days and I’ve already showed it to all my friends (pardon me if you get this message more than once etc., etc.), yet I still haven’t had enough of it. So enter the records, it shall.

It’s weird, right? Like someone took a regular space photo and then painted that spiral over it — badly! Or like one of those mesmerizing examples of neural style transfer or creepy AI-generated art.

What it actually is, is a binary system where one of the stars has started to eject its envelopes at the end of its life, while the other still circles it, leaving a spiral trail in the outflowing gas. The regular gaps between the trails correspond to the 800-year orbital period of the binary.

This was an Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2018 July 8. You can read more about the image and the spiral in it there.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Domingo Pestana & Raul Villaverde.