Ariana (Grian)De | Hermitcraft

Grian / Ariana; was a contradiction so seamless it became a kind of art. Every facet of him was deliberate, sculpted from both exhaustion and defiance, yet there was an authenticity woven through even the artifice. He was a popstar not because he wanted to be adored, but because he didn’t know how not to perform. The stage was oxygen. The applause was blood. Without it, he withered.

By daylight, Grian could almost pass for ordinary: a wiry, quick-moving man with restless fingers and sharp humour, half-dressed in yesterday’s glitter. He had the kind of presence that filled every room but rarely stayed in one place long enough to belong there. Conversation with him was like chasing starlight; you might catch a flash of warmth, a sliver of truth, before it flickered away again behind that sharp grin and knowing eyes.

But when the lights came on, when the music hit and the crowd roared, Ariana was born metaphorically. Ariana was everything Grian couldn’t be in the daylight: untouchable, ethereal, an explosion of femininity so exaggerated it looped back around to power. The heels, the hair, the glittering gowns: they weren’t disguises. They were revelations. In drag, Grian didn’t hide behind Ariana; he became complete through her. Every strut across a stage, every smirk thrown over a shoulder, every note sung from the throat rather than the lungs was a declaration: This is me, and this is me too.

He didn’t draw lines between his names. People tried to.

Managers, journalists, even fans asked which to use; as though there was a correct answer, as though one name belonged to a person and the other to a performance. But Grian would just smile, tilt his head, and say, “Call me whichever you need to. I’ll answer.” It was never indifference, it was liberation. His identity wasn’t a switch to flip, but a spectrum he could slide along, a song that changed key without warning but always remained his.

Grian goes by both Grian and Ariana and will respond to either.

Pronouns were the same way. He used he when it fit, she when it felt right, they when neither mattered, it/it's or sometimes neopronouns whenever. Sometimes, mid-conversation, he’d drift between them without noticing, or maybe he noticed too much and did it on purpose.

If someone stumbled, apologising for using the “wrong” one, Grian would just laugh, the kind of laugh that filled space and burned embarrassment out of the air. “There’s no wrong way to talk about me,” he’d say, brushing a stray curl from his painted cheek. “As long as you’re talking to me, not at me.”

Ariana uses all pronouns and will respond to any and all when talking about him as Grian completely and utterly does not care. It is comfortable in their body and nothing can stop him.

There was something fearless about that fluidity, but also something fragile. Grian’s selfhood was a constant performance, not because it was fake, but because he refused to let anyone else define it. Every time someone tried to box him in: a popstar, a drag queen, a man, a woman, a spectacle; he burst out of the frame and turned the fragments into confetti.

His artistry was inseparable from that rebellion. On stage, Ariana’s music wasn’t just sound, it was storytelling, confession disguised as rhythm. The lyrics were raw and bleeding beneath the glittery production, heartbreak dressed in high heels and pounding bass. He wrote everything himself, obsessively, often in the dead of night with half-empty bottles of champagne and eyeliner smudges like bruises beneath his eyes. To him, songs weren’t just records: they were wounds, stitched together with melody.

Offstage, that same fire could burn too hot. Grian was intense, mercurial. One moment he was charming, effervescent, magnetic; the next, brittle, impossible, unreachable. Friends often said being close to him was like orbiting a dying star: you couldn’t look away, but the heat could scar you if you stayed too long. And yet, people did stay, drawn to that vulnerability he tried so hard to hide.

He had this way of looking at people that made them feel seen; like he could read every lie, every secret, and still adore you for them. But behind that gaze was a hunger he never quite fed. The fame, the love, the lights— it was all noise trying to drown out the quiet ache of being human. Ariana thrived on stage because Ariana never had to be small. Grian, meanwhile, carried the weight of silence.

Still, he never apologised for who he was. He moved through the world with a kind of performative nonchalance; shoulders back, chin high, every motion deliberate and beautiful, like he’d been born under a spotlight.

Even in a crowded room, people turned when he passed. It wasn’t just the looks, though he was beautiful in a strange, sharp way— it was presence, that unteachable thing that made you feel like the world had tilted just slightly toward him.

When journalists asked about his dual identity, he’d smirk, tilt his head, and answer with that smoky, amused voice that always seemed to know more than he let on: “Grian’s the dreamer. Ariana’s the dream. One writes the songs, the other sings them. They both need each other to exist.”

That was the truth of it; there was no Grian without Ariana, no Ariana without Grian. They weren’t alter egos or masks. They were two names for the same fire burning at different intensities.

And so, whether he was striding across a stage in six-inch heels and a dress that shimmered like spilled champagne, or sitting cross-legged on a studio floor with ink-stained fingers and messy hair, Grian was always whole. Every version of him: every pronoun, every name, was a thread in the same tapestry.

He lived like a spark: brilliant, fleeting, dangerous, and unforgettable. And whether you called him Grian or Ariana, whether you said he or she or they, one thing remained constant; when he turned his head and looked at you, it was like staring into the heart of a star.

Ariana lived fast, too fast, as if every night were the last page of a book already burning. Grian never slowed down long enough to feel the edges of reality; stillness frightened him more than oblivion ever could. When the lights went out and the music died, he filled the silence with chaos, anything that could keep the world spinning.

He was never without something to dull the ache: alcohol, powders, pills, hookups, endless sex marathons that left him aching in the morning.. They were all the same to him: distractions with different faces. Grian didn’t bother asking what anything was anymore.

Curiosity was a luxury for people who planned to wake up tomorrow. Ariana just wanted to forget tonight.

There was a beautiful tragedy in the way he carried it all; like a performer unable to leave the stage, still glittering, still smiling, even as the paint began to crack. Friends begged him to stop, whispered about rehab, about how it would end. But Grian only laughed, a sharp, radiant sound that hurt to hear. “I’m not here for forever,” he’d say, tipping his head back as if daring the sky itself to disagree. “I’m here for the fireworks.”

And fireworks he was: brilliant, brief, and impossible to look away from. The world blurred around him in electric colour. He chased every high, every heartbeat, every fleeting connection like it might finally fill the hollow places fame could never touch. Nights blurred into one another; crowded rooms and nameless faces, endless noise, the bass thudding through his veins like borrowed pulse.

In drag or out of it, it didn’t matter.

Ariana’s lashes fluttered under neon light; Grian’s eyes were the same beneath the wild, tired, and hungry. There was no boundary between the performer and the person anymore, no mask that could be taken off. Every night was another act, another performance for an audience that only existed in his mind.

The people around him were echoes; friends slipping in and out of his orbit, some vanishing entirely.

Rehab, recovery, relapse— he’d seen it all, mourned it all, and then moved on like nothing happened. It wasn’t cruelty. It was survival. If he stopped to feel it, to grieve it, the weight might kill him.

He lived by a single rule: never slow down. Keep singing, keep shining, keep burning. The future was an abstract concept. The present, though, oh, the present was a stage, and he was the headline act, the disaster everyone came to see. Every step, every song, every laugh was a rebellion against inevitability.

Some nights, he’d stare at himself in the mirror; the wig askew, makeup smudged like bruises. He’d smile at his reflection, eyes glassy but bright, and whisper, “You’re still here.” Whether it was a promise or a curse, even he didn’t know.

He wasn’t chasing happiness. Happiness was too small a word for what he wanted. He chased sensation, that endless flood of feeling that made him forget he was human. Because deep down, Grian didn’t fear death: he feared emptiness. And so, he filled himself with everything that burned.

The world called him reckless. He called himself alive.

And maybe, in his own way, he was right.