#shields

historic-mysteries:

Thick Skinned: Why Did Vikings Really Cover Their Shields with Leather? - Historic Mysteries

In Northern Europe, Vikings raiders made good use of shields in their battles. These shields were made of wooden boards covered with stretched animal skins.

Here’s page 93 from my new book Poses for Artists Volume 6.

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sleepytisi:

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They say the best offence is a good defense.

Creating a set of effective personal shields is possibly one of the most important things a witch can do – but don’t just settle for a simple bubble or mirror shield! These are easily broken with enough force, and if that’s your only line of defense, you’re in trouble!

The most effective way to protect oneself is to have an array of layers to one’s wards – each with a different purpose. The ones I will be covering are listed below, in the order of outermost to innermost:

• Cloaking shield – Made of a bubble of water, it reflects and refracts light, keeping me from detection.
  
• Clam shell shield – Barrier against harmful forces
  
• Decoy clam shells – I created several identical clam shells within the cloaking shield to distract from the main shield
  
• Warning (“stop poking around, or you’ll get hurt”)
  
• Pearl shield – Barrier against harmful forces
  
• Epidermis of Jellyfish – Thin layer of fleshy material to keep the inner shields separated and to help with noise reduction of Siren’s Song
  
• Mesoglea of Jellyfish – Thick, goopy, gelatinous layer. Sticky, hard to get through, slows intruder down, acts as noise dampener for Siren’s Song (Lined with Gastrodermis to keep the mesoglea where it belongs)
  
• Siren’s Song – Charged with actual singing. Linked to a queen conch. Conch acts as a storage facility for the energy used to charge all the shields. Siren’s Song draws the intruder further in and traps them, draining them and sending their energy to the conch. Linked by blood to me and also linked to a small conch pendant. The pendant acts as a conduit for directing the energy to myself. 
  

I’ve assembled the shields in a few different segments, as the outer oceanic layer took much more energy than I anticipated. I tested the segments in phases, as they were assembled. Phase 2 was during my recharge at the ocean. I required a significant amount of energy for building the siren’s song spell layer, and reinforced the ocean layer during this time.

“Siren’s Song” by Sara Singer or “Siren” by Red Delicious are both great tunes to sing for this shield’s charge up. Imagine a harmful entity breaching the walls, breaking past the barriers that were set up, then hearing your soothing voice singing. It becomes enthralled and wants to come closer, drawn in further. Finally making it to the center of the chamber, the conch shell sits on a dais, emanating the haunting song you’re singing. The entity picks the shell up, lovingly, and is sucked inside. The shell drops back to the dais, and the entity is trapped.

“Seven Seas there were once, and the eighth was born.” ~Khnum

Ward Testing

Phase 1:

Ocean, decoys, shell, warning, and pearl.

Testers: Unutha, Eilena, and Khnum

Khnum was first. Khnum astral projected into the wards and gave this as a result:

“They look good, the liquidity makes it difficult to get a grasp on them to see if there’s a way of getting through, and they’re kind of scary in a suck-away-at-you way once you touch them. The complication of the parts in them make it hard to see you clearly, too. It’s really weird, like a river rolled into a ball.”

I didn’t sense Khnum any time he projected to me. He’s got a very subtle energy signature.

Eilena went next, shooting me with an energy blast.

She followed the energy to the destination. The blast didn’t penetrate the shell. She described the ocean layer as being thick, and giving a sense of drowning.

Eilena came to me as a vision of a storm over the ocean.

Unutha was last, in this set. He tried to probe the wards with a weapon, and poke holes. He hit a decoy.

“Okay so I felt like I was in the water of an aquarium, I pushed through and hit what i thought was you, smashed through you and got to this darker section like the deep ocean and then tried to push through a black orb/egg. To be fair I was improvising with what I had.”

I asked if he hit any warnings, and he said an octopus grabbed him, but he slashed at it with the same thing he was using to stab my wards.

Unutha felt like a cool breeze on my face.

Khnum went again after this, wanting to try an ice attack with gypsum.

He wanted to try to freeze a section. He got a piece about the size of his palm and then it receded back. He saw things moving around, but nothing noticed him.

I felt something akin to being annoyed by a bug but unable to kill it.

I liked to use Khnum as a method to describe the ocean shield layer.

Phase 2:

How does being at the ocean affect the shields?

Testers: Khnum was the only one available to test this round. I had him test twice.

When I went to the beach, I absorbed the energy pretty quickly. As a sea witch, the ocean recharges me. By the end of the beach trip, I had absorbed so much energy that I was filled with a sense of love and belonging, and my entire body was vibrating.

First test was being within a mile from the ocean but not actually on the beach. Khnum’s description is as follows:

“More. The bubble sort of exploded. You’re a tiny space inside a really thick sphere.”

Second test was being at the actual beach, in the water:

“That’s odd. It’s thickened again and this time you’re not in the center. There’s one huge sphere of water and one inner sphere, which you’re in, but the inner sphere is near the bottom of the bigger one which is almost entirely above ground. There’s a big empty space above you and I saw things swimming in it that reminded me a little of sea turtles.

I think you’ve gone and created a spell ecosystem out of this. xD ”

Phase 3:

Jellyfish layers, and siren’s song.

Testers: Khnum, Eilena, Kiley, and Jelly

Khnum was apprehensive, but went in.

“Apprehensive but comfortable! Here goes nothing.

Hmph. Whirlpool trap?

I got into the pearl and then started spinning around and couldn’t get out again.

It was pretty scary. xD I’m neither claustrophobic nor thassalophobic, but the combination of the two was new and unnerving. It was definitely a good deterrent from getting to you, so I have no doubt it’ll work on spirits!”

Once he was trapped, I blew on the shell and released him. I asked if he was able to see a way out. He said no, but after a minute he just sort of phased out of it.

“I did find the shield to be alarmingly beautiful and got drawn in -maybe I did hear the song but didn’t register it?”

He was drawn down there by a light from the outer layer, which indicated that the jellyfish wasn’t enough to dampen the attraction of the song. I thickened the jellyfish walls, but a light was still mildly visible. I used a combination of sea life and squid ink to obscure the light.

“The ink makes it black. It’s scary and not as pretty but more effective. xD”

Eilena came through and described the event:

“That’s… very pink.” She describes being very close to being pulled into the trap. “pink, sticky and pulling, felt it siphoning off some energy but not at a fast rate. Getting back out was harder than getting in. Sort of a ‘just give up and relax, settle down, it’s cozy here’ feeling. There was some vague sound but I couldn’t really make it out, almost just like a white noise kind of background thing.”

I asked about any sealife, since Una got attacked by an octopus. Eilena mentioned zapping an eel after it zapped her. This explains the tightness I felt in my chest during the testing. I felt a heaviness when she got there, which she explained as her going for a stone’s weight to sink through the vast ocean layer as fast as possible. She didn’t feel or sense the Siren’s Song from outside the shell, but once she made it inside the shell, she felt the “relax” sensation.

I asked if there were any other things that she wants to mention that I didn’t ask about. “mm, I think there were sort of like jellyfish tentacles? Contributing to the ‘pulling in’. They didn’t sting but they seemed to be where the energy drain was coming from. My impressions are usually pretty vague, sorry.”

She added that  “it seemed like I went through a lot of pink, with the pull getting stronger as I went in. I’m not sure if not getting caught was just because I didn’t go far enough in, or if I was just able to fight the pull enough to get out again.”

I suggested the pink she saw was the inside of the conch, and she agreed, stating that the color was “queen conch pink.”

She describes the “just relax” feeling as being very hard to shake, and the conch being much harder to get out of than it was to get in.

I explained that Khnum had the sensation of being sucked in violently. She had a much more delicate experience? She described it as fighting the current on the way out. Some of her energy was sucked into the conch and is currently stored there.

She also described feeling tentacles helping pull her in, and a pulsing sensation like that of a heartbeat.

Jelly came into the ward system to poke around. He came with no intent for harm, and nothing attacked him while he was there. He had trouble finding me in the ocean ward and asked for help from a giant octopus. The octopus grabbed him and flung him toward a giant clam shell. I instructed him to knock and describe what he saw: 

“Some sort of shell with a glowing spherical thing inside. The shell looks like a conch shell. I can’t tell the details of the area but it’s manifesting in my mind as a theatre and the shell is on the stage playing the song?? But that seems to be a glamour/illusion. Outside of the glamour, it seems to be on a regular table that is…brown in color?” (When I cast this part of the spell, I indeed set up a glamour for that very image and the physical shell was on my brown kitchen table at the time I cast).  “On the surface of my thoughts I feel calm, but my gut feeling knows it’s a trap. I feel like I’m slowly being coaxed into the shell.” I instructed Jelly to try and touch the shell. “I poked it and the suck intensified like 3000x. But I still resisted it and didn’t get sucked in, though you probably got a bit of my energy.”  I confirm that I did get a small amount of energy. He said he jumped back as soon as the sucking got stronger.

We did some additional testing, like throwing in negative feelings. The conch seems to eject anything that might harm me.

Kiley asked to test something with my wards. She wanted to see how her wards (which are nearly identical to mine) interact with my wards. When she came in, she described a feeling like two oceans meeting. I felt as though I were suddenly covered in water, with it filling my lungs. I felt a warm calm. Like family was with me.

I asked if she felt a warning layer at all, and to describe what she saw and felt.

“That was when I got the tenseness on my back and neck. After the warning layer. I heard the song and I found it nice and delightful. But I didn’t feel a need to follow it, per say. Part of that may have been because I know exactly what that is lol. And maybe because I didn’t come with the intent of malice or to attack at all. So it didn’t draw me in like I think it is meant to for others who are aiming to cause you harm.”

Final Results

The amount of energy you need to put into this is taxing, to be sure, but well worth the effort. The more you concentrate and reinforce the layers, the stronger they get.

The siren’s song is charged by singing. I’m compelled to sing constantly while wearing the pendant. The compulsion and love energy that’s required for the spell is… lovely. But it lasts a while. Possibly have an outlet for it when the spell is done. Blood and seawater anchor the shell battery and the shell conduit to each other and to myself.

Jellyfish not initially thick enough to reduce draw from outside layers. Thickened walls, but a “light” was perceived still (though dampened). I used squid ink and sea life to obscure the light, which seemed to work.

The description of a current which can be fought against is concerning, as I would prefer it to be impossible to escape, but it may not be a bad thing for escape to be possible. Eilena’s escape causes me to wonder what the effects would be on someone who got away? I have a bit of her energy in the shell. Is there a link? Will it continue to siphon slowly?

Note: Hubby came home and saw the altar with the conch on it. He touched the conch and some of his energy drained into it and filtered into my necklace. Kiley has the same ward, and at my request, had her significant other touch it. Same results. Energy drain, mild, no immediate reaction from either person, but definite feel in the necklace.

Addendum: Unwitting friend touched the pendant. It did not take energy from her.

Second Addendum: I work with someone who can see auras. She came up to me to tell me the shell was white when it just blended in with my orange the last time she saw me and asked what was different. I let her touch it and she described feeling electricity. Eilena’s energy has been feeding into me all day and I had described it to Eilena as feeling like electricity flowing through my veins, along with a vague feeling of being untouchable.

Third Addendum: Eilena cleansed herself right after coming out of the wards, so if a link was established, it was broken when she cleansed it. Results of this are unknown until further testing is done.

The ecosystem I created requires a lot of energy to sustain, but I charge it during my showers and it feels great. I worry that the salinity will eventually be low enough to mess with the life that is in the sphere, if a regular beach visit isn’t done. That’s a test for another day.

The shell layer seems very strong, as does the pearl. The octopus was a bit out of nowhere, as I didn’t intend for the life in my ecosystem to attack intruders but rather just be there for fun. I’m glad they double as protectors. The decoys work fairly well, though Eilena and Khnum were able to find me by using my image as a taglock. I think Jelly went for the idea of me rather than focusing on a taglock, to keep things fair.

Conclusion

There are a lot of factors that I didn’t anticipate. For example, I drew an octopus for a focus while creating the ocean layer, but I didn’t anticipate it becoming a guardian. I also didn’t anticipate the queen conch absorbing energy from humans who touch the physical shell. This can, of course, be tweaked if it doesn’t suit the needs of the person utilizing this shield. I, personally, am a fan of this unexpected twist.

The wards are strong and malleable. They are intricate, and versatile. They should stand up to just about anything that is thrown at them.

Thank you to the testers for putting themselves in harm’s way to help with this experiment.

som sonic oc stufffff

A tortoise, was the name given to several other objects:

1. To the Lyra, because it was sometimes made of a tortoise-shell.
2. To an arched or vaulted roof.
3. To a military machine moving upon wheels and roofed over, used in besieging cities
4. To the covering made by a close body of soldiers who placed their shields over their heads to secure themselves against the darts of the enemy.