sunrisejewelofcorona:

“Really?” In a rush of excitement, she forgot she was the one thing keeping Ravi falling flat. She jumped up and squealed gleefully. His chair fell forward and his nose undoubtedly experienced some abuse. “Oops.” After pulling him back up, she unwrapped him and allowed him to get his bearings. The first thing she realized once he was fully standing was how much taller than her he was. Ma was fairly tall too. Rapunzel wondered if they were especially tall or if she was short. Were all the other people tall outside?

She didn’t allow herself to focus on it for too long. Aside from having to prepare herself for a journey, she didn’t want him to notice her trying to mentally measure his height. Rapunzel disappeared into the tower’s only bedchamber to make her decision about what to take along with her.

Once her hand slipped, Ravi and the chair were introduced to his good ol’ friend gravity causing him to quickly plummet to the ground once again. With another loud thunk, his whimper of pain was followed by a weak squeak, “You broke my smoulder.” He groaned as the girl hoisted him up while his mind was trying to will his body, especially his face, to not bruise from all this abuse that was inflicted on him in the past few hours. His restraints were loosened as her hair unwound and piled around him.

Once free, he carefully stepped around the seemingly endless raven locks and smoothed down his clothes. He out an irritated sigh as he ran his fingers through his own scraggly hair then down his face. He then gingerly felt around his scalp to find any tender spots from all the hits, wincing then grumbling again once he found a small bump. Annoyed, he looked around the room one last time as he rubbed the back of his neck to see if he could spot any traces of his satchel.

With no luck he neared the window to check out the drop, not even bothering to revel in the girl’s radiating energy and excitement. He let out another huff as he collected the arrows that he used to scale up the tower not too long ago (or at least he thought wasn’t too long ago) from the floor. With no belongings other than his satchel, which was out of his reach at the moment, he didn’t find a need to linger in the place any longer. The faster he took her to see the lanters and took her home, the faster he’d get his satchel back and rid of her. 

He hoisted himself onto the window sill and carefully swung his body over after securing the arrows into the side of the tower. With a grunt, he started to descend. Exiting a tower this way would of course take longer than the stairs, but as he remembered, there were no exits leading down beside that window. After a while, he stopped to holler up at the window, “You comin’, Alka?”

cultural-escapist:

India by Mira Bai on Flickr.

thedisneytruth:

Rapunzel by arabianberry

earthly-fauna:

BOG_6775edit by John MacNab on Flickr.

megustacurry:

Jaipur - entrance Hotel Umaid Mahal by wund i indienfahrer on Flickr.

leirepj:

endless list of movies i rewatch frequently » Tangled (2010)

I’ve been looking out a window for 18 years, dreaming about what it might feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it’s not everything that I dreamed it would be?

(Source: juliansarks)

omgthatartifact:

Dagger

India, 1877

The Royal Collection

“In addition to the luxurious, jewelled quality which is common to most of the gifts presented during the Prince of Wales’s Indian tour of 1875-6, this dagger boasts a blade of exceptional accomplishment. It is of steel, with a single polished edge and with two etched shallow grooves flanking a drilled bore in four sections which are filled with loose seed pearls. It is all the more admirable on technical grounds for the fact that the bore follows the curve of the blade. Such a weapon would obviously have certain practical limitations and it must be seen instead as an exercise in master bladesmithing.”

whoismanvir:

Take off! by markpaulandrews on Flickr.

sunrisejewelofcorona:

What…what was he doing? His eyes were squinted as if he were blinded by something and his lips were all puckered like the illustrations of fish in her storybooks. He looked so silly. What exactly was this strange expression supposed to accomplish aside from confusing her? The corner of her mouth twitched for a moment, anticipating the laughter resounding in her mind to burst out her mouth. She held firm though, glowering at him in return. She had a goal to achieve here. This was no longer about seeing lights. There was a world outside her tower that she had never seen and what’s more, there was a tower keeping her away from the world that she may never have the chance to leave again. This Ravi was her only way out.

Rapunzel let her eyes pierce through his so-called “smoulder”. She could sense Pascal on her shoulder, joining in. For whatever reason, Pascal was even more reluctant to trust Ravi. Maybe he just didn’t like threat of an alpha male in his tower. Not that Rapunzel truly understood what an alpha male was anyway. She could find out on the outside though, as soon as Ravi stopped being so very hard-headed.

Ravi kept up the smoulder as best as he could, but to see absolutely no reaction from the girl was completely discouraging. He held it a few more moments, almost pleading in his mind for this to work. It had to! And yet, still nothing. Not even from the frog. Not that the frog would be any help in this situation. There had to be something wrong with this girl or something.

“This is kind of an off day for me,” he said through his pursed lips. “This doesn’t normally happen.” With a heavy sigh, he dropped the look and gave in, seeing that this was getting him nowhere as the girl stayed adamant against his strongest maneuver against the opposite sex. “Fine. I’ll take you to see the lanterns.”

sunrisejewelofcorona:

There it was, the argument she was waiting for. Of course, it wasn’t theargument exactly. She expected he simply wouldn’t want to take her. What could she say to someone who could not take her even if he wanted to? Rapunzel turned her head to Pascal and found that his resolve hadn’t wavered. He stuck his chest out to remind her that if she wanted to achieve anything here she would have to stay strong. She jumped down from her platform and used her hair as a lasso to pull Ravi up off of the floor.

“Something brought you here, Ravi Rider.” Rapunzel informed him. She found herself becoming angry at him for not even trying to understand how badly she needed to leave this tower. “Call it what you will: fate, destiny…” She too one step and pulled on a fistful of hair at the end of each statement. “So I have made the decision to trust you.” Rapunzel tugged hard and his chair nearly toppled over. Her right hand was the only thing keeping his face apart from the floor and at this point, she wasn’t afraid to let it fall if necessary. He wasn’t leaving her alone in this tower, not when she finally had a way out. “But trust me when tell you this. You can tear this tower apart brick by brick, but without my help, you will never find your precious satchel.”

There was only one thing she could give him as leverage here. “I promise.” There was nothing stronger about Rapunzel than her word. “And when I promise something, I never ever break that promise. Ever.”

The blase expression changed to a bewildered one as Ravi and the chair he was bound to was hoisted upright again and the girl started to assert the situation again. Clearly it wasn’t getting through to her that he simply couldn’t help—as if he wanted to help in the first place.

Her talk of him appearing there as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ was something to scoff at. “A horse,” he corrected, but she didn’t care. And what was that about deciding to trust him? She had to be kidding. “A horrible decision really,” he interjected, but she didn’t break her speech on whatever she was rambling about. Suddenly he lurched forward with another tug of her hair. The familiar feeling of falling flat on his face arose again as the chair started tilting. His fall was broken as she caught the back of the chair and he was nose nose to nose with her. The close glare from her frog was even more unnerving as he listened more attentively.

Once she was done speaking, he cleared his throat. “Let me get this straight,” he started. “I take you to see the lanterns, bring you back home, and you’ll give me my satchel?” He let the deal hang in the air for a moment, still wearing a skeptical look as her serious expression bore into him.

“All right, listen,” he finally said. “I didn’t want to have to do this, but you leave me no choice. Here comes the smoulder,” he warned. He dropped his head for a moment, only to look back up at her with his signature look: a suave, yet imploring gleam in his eyes, brows furrowed to compliment his pleading gaze, and perfect lips puckered in a pout to top it all off. The Smoulder. This was surely to have her in a puddle at his feet with this fail-proof move.