Elk (they/them). Writer of fiction and poetry in range of genre and style, but always seeking to capture the beauty in darkness. elkambrosescott.carrd.co
Hi there, and glad tidings. My name is Elk Ambrose Scott. I’m a speculative fiction writer, poet and full-time creature of the night. By that I mean, of course, that I willingly chose the night shift and the vampirism allegations are completely false. Welcome to my primary Tumblr home, where I post thoughts on writing, tiny pieces of beautiful darkness, and occasionally Berserk shitposts.
My work is primarily focused on dark, macabre themes but not without moments of hope and lightness. The wound is the place where the light enters, after all, according to the poet Rumi. I approach my writing from my lens as a queer and disabled person, and I also had to promise that I’d include references to blood or death in everything when I signed my paperwork to be alt.
I think it goes without saying, but AI does not touch my work in any capacity. If they want my work, they need to pay me.
𝔽𝕦𝕟 𝔽𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕤
I’ve been on Tumblr since around 2013 in various ways. I have seen a lot in my time here, but I keep coming back like comfort watching the same video of a puppy running into a mirror. I am the puppy. Tumblr is the mirror.
I have to be careful about research so I don’t fall into a rabbit hole. Shout out to my friend [REDACTED] who helps me with anything tech related, and to my husband for being my living action figure and standing in ridiculous poses or dragging me across the floor by my leg to get the nuance of a scene juuust right.
I have been publishing work long enough that some of it is out of print. This is unfortunate, as some of the only copies exist on the hard drive of the other contributors and in the annals of my file systems. One day I’ll share some of it here, with commentary!
I will soon be posting more about it, but I have a series of pieces that I don’t think will find a home with traditional publishing, and I am going to post them here. The series is called Adamantine and is a collection of novellas focused on Greek mythology. The series is queer, dark and based on a short story that I’ve had published (Runneth Over--link to the publication in the carrd above!).
Synopsis:
In Ancient Greece, following the death of Zeus, heroes and monsters of myth and legend face the twilight of their world and their past sins colliding as they navigate a world where only the most powerful force of all is promised: love.
Here's the project announcement page. <3
I will be posting this on Royal Road at https://www.royalroad.com/profile/974091/fictions
Tags will be updated as more of the project is posted.
“Do human women really wear...this, to prove their devotion to their mates?” Ankla asked, wiping her fingers on her tattered pants. “It seems a little pointless, doesn’t it?”
The undercity doesn't reward kindness, and Ren knows better than to get involved. She survives by fixing broken machines, keeping her head down, and never, ever letting anyone close. But when she finds a discarded pleasure android slumped in a filthy corridor—still powered, still waiting for orders, still offering a service no one asked for—walking away feels like becoming the thing she's spent years trying not to be.
The android has no name, no concept of want, and no script for a human who refuses to use her. Ren has a history that makes every touch a negotiation and every kindness suspect. What begins as a reluctant rescue becomes something quieter and more difficult: two people, one synthetic, learning what it means to have a self—and what it costs to let someone else see it.
Chapter 1
The rain down here wasn't rain. Rain came from a sky. This was condensation from the levels above—greasy, chemical, picking up whatever it dripped through on the way down. Rust, mostly. Sometimes piss. Sometimes something that had died in a vent and was still in the process of becoming a smell. Ren had learned years ago not to look up when a drop hit her neck. You didn't want to know.
She kept her head down. Habit, mostly, but also math. The emergency lights on this level were failing again, their glow barely enough to separate puddle from solid ground, and a twisted ankle meant lost work. Lost work meant skipped meals. Ren's boots knew the difference anyway. Thousands of hours walking these corridors had taught her feet their own kind of vision.
Her forearms ached—a deep, specific throb along the seam where flesh met the reinforcement plate. Always the first place to complain. She'd spent the last two hours hauling a generator up three flights for a mechanic who'd paid half what he'd promised and acted like she should be grateful for the exposure. She'd known the job was bad math from the start. She'd taken it anyway. That was the part that stuck in her throat.
She shifted the strap of her utility vest. The capacitors inside dug into her spine. Inventory, such as it was. Scavenged wiring. A couple of data chips she hadn't tested yet. Nothing worth the weight. The neural jack at the base of her skull itched where her collar rubbed the seal. She'd need to clean it when she got home. Add it to the list.
Just get home. Patch the cell. Sleep for four hours. Repeat.
The prayer ran on a low loop in the back of her head. Almost comforting. Four walls, a workbench, the quiet hum of her charging station. She didn't need anything else. Didn't want anything else. Wants were a liability. Wants made you stupid. She had learned that the hard way, back before the mods, back when she'd wanted things she couldn't afford and paid for them in ways that still surfaced in her dreams without warning.
She hated being out this late. The upper-level drones had been sweeping the main alleys again—cops or corporate or whatever passed for authority this week—and she didn't have the patience for another scan-and-question routine. Her ID was clean enough. Her mods were all registered, mostly. But the questions always lingered too long on the neural jack, on the reinforced hands, on the way her jaw sat just a little too sharp under the right light. Better to risk the derelict blocks than get clocked by some bored security rig with a hard-on for power.
She was halfway down the corridor when her ocular implant pinged.
Faint heat signature.Barely above ambient. The diagnostic overlay flickered on her view automatically, she'd set it to manual trigger months ago, but the implant had its own ideas about what was worth flagging, and apparently a cold corpse of a power cell didn't qualify. A cool violet-blue glow pulsed from the junction up ahead. Steady. Not the arrhythmic stutter of a dying strip. Not the flicker of a fire. Something still running. Something still powered.
Ren slowed down.
Probably a drone, she told herself. Crashed. Good salvage. She'd check it, strip the usable parts, and be home in an hour. Clean. Simple. A transaction.
She stopped anyway.
The pause stretched. Water dripped from the edge of her vest and hit the cracked floor with a sound like a metronome counting down to nothing. The only other noises were the distant hum of the city far above her and the quiet buzz of her ocular implant trying to focus through the dark.
She took a step. Then another one.
The glow resolved into a pair of dim eyes.
The android was slumped against the crumbling concrete like someone had simply dropped her and kept walking. Long silver-white hair, matted and streaked with grime, clung to her face and shoulders. Pale synthetic skin, ugly tears across her left shoulder and thigh, exposing delicate lattices of glowing blue circuitry beneath. The damage pattern was wrong. Not impact damage from a fall or a fight. Deliberate. Someone had ripped the outer layer away.
Her elegant frame, clearly built for upper-level clients, looked painfully out of place among the filth and broken pipes. What little clothing remained was torn black lace, barely covering anything, soaked through and clinging to her body like a second skin.
Companion model, Ren's brain catalogued automatically. CX series. Looks like an 8, maybe. Someone paid sixty, seventy thousand creds for this unit. Definitely more than what i make in a year
And then they just threw her away.
The android’s head shifted slightly at the sound of Ren's boots. Violet-blue optics flickered, struggling to maintain focus through the rain and low power. For a second, Ren thought she might be completely offline, that the flicker was just residual charge bleeding from a dying capacitor.
And then, she spoke.
Her voice was soft. Modulated. The kind of voice that had been designed to sound pleasant no matter what condition the unit was in.
The kind to make you feel served.
“Designation…” Her voice was soft, almost gentle despite the damage. “CX-29 Unit. Serial 49 Primary systems at eleven percent. Motor functions compromised.”
Ren didn't answer. Her tongue felt thick, glued to the roof of her mouth.
The android continued, her tone disturbingly calm, like she was reciting something she’d said a thousand times before.
“This unit remains capable of providing companionship and pleasure services. Please state your preferred configuration, or—”
“S- Stop.”
The word came out rougher than Ren meant it to.
The android went silent immediately. Her glowing eyes stayed locked on Ren’s face, waiting with an eerie and uncanny kind of patience.
Ren felt a cold settle on her chest.
She knew that tone. That automatic offering. The way someone could be trained to present itself like an object the second another person got close. She shook her head, tring to not think, to not remember, this past. She exhaled slowly through her nose, her jaw tight.
“I’m not here for that,” she said, quieter this time.
The android tilted her head slightly, processing. A thin stream of water ran down her cheek from her wet hair.
“…Query,” she said after a beat. “Your intent?”
Ren looked at her for a long moment.
Every rational part of her brain telling her to turn around and keep walking. Androids like this didn’t end up discarded in places like this without reason. She was probably tagged, or glitching, or worse. Getting involved was asking for trouble.
But the way she was sitting…
The way she was just... waiting. Like she'd already been thrown away and hadn't figured it out yet.
Like she expected to be left in the dark and wasn't going to waste power hoping otherwise.
Ren's hands uncurled at her sides. She felt the faint click of her finger joints realigning, the soft hum of the micro-tools settling back into standby. Her voice, when it came, was rougher than she intended. Not angry. Just tired.
"Intent…" she said, "is to get you out of this corridor before your circuits fry. If you'll let me
Welcome to DBT tools with Elk, where we do the opposite action of how we feel so the horrors don't drag us to hell! On today's episode: instead of doom posting, dog posting! My dog Princess usually looks like she's having a panic attack or has seen through time in every picture I take, so please enjoy these pictures of my dog where she actually looks like she's enjoying life
Because I experience gender as a hole I carry, a hollow place calling out for a body like a Junji Ito story, except there is no hole that I will ever fit in. I carry it and pretend it's not there until something reminds me that a part of me is missing, empty, a gnawing feeling that I can't satiate. I experience gender as a place I've only been in dreams, something that felt real until I opened my eyes and woke up in someone else's bed. I look in the mirror and I experience gender as a horror movie where someone else is looking at me, watching me from within, something foreign, something alien, something monstrous. I experience gender as a dead monster, once alive and unafraid of anything but the fire without, wielded by hands taught to burn everything outside a norm dictated by hands that have never held a torch. I am the creature lying prone on th ground, waiting for a finishing blow.
I experience gender as an apology, that I wasn't strong enough to finish the job of slaying the monster that lives behind my wet, bloodshot eyes. I can't help but feel like at some point I failed a task I was taught since birth, when they looked down and saw a woman and not the monster I became. I'm sorry. Is that what you wanted to hear. I say it to the creature in the mirror; I'm sorry something about you is missing but you don't know what. I'm sorry about the hole. I'm sorry I'm sad about it. I'm sorry that on my good days I'm not. If I am a woman I am hollow all the way down, if I am a man I am empty to the core. I experience gender as a noose woven from my own hair, cut and cut and cut and soft and soft and soft. It tightens and I have long since stopped thrashing. I experience gender as a squeeze of the chest, a weight on the throat, an involuntary kick.
This poem might be finished, it might not. I don't know if I'll ever experience gender as anything but grief.
I was tagged by @purple-on-black :) Time to pick something good.
Rules: share a line from your story with zero context.
Since I have a couple of projects going on, I hope it's alright if I share a couple of out of context lines <3
From Adamantine (cheating a bit, because it's a couple lines):
Your first kill came weeks later. Mother told you to survive, but not to be good. You were so hungry then. So very, very hungry.
This is from an earlier draft of my current project, The Goblin Bride:
“Love, Clarriss. Love is stronger than any magic there is. You can render a potion inert, you can create a dead zone, and you can block a spell. But love? Nothing stops it. Not fists, not fear, and not blood.”
This is from a Twine interactive fiction/game that I finished the first draft/outline of this week:
Tomorrow, maybe you’ll forget that the hole inside you is there until you trip over a rock, walking behind your armoured rescuers, and gain a dent in your head that won’t heal. It won’t ever heal.
And then finally, this one is from a project currently in the editing stage:
When Kogen’s voice failed to drop, like he’d expected it to, he’d panicked because he was sure that if he continued to sound like a “miserable warbling songbird” that Aldox would alter him, just like he did Mercuria. It wasn’t until later that he’d realized that there was a reason it wasn’t dropping.
Perhaps I need to slow down on the projects. Just having too much fun (read: my medication isn't handling my stress and I need to write constantly to feel sane). I'm going to tag my beloved @blades-of-calmoran (I know you have at least ONE line written) as well as @jaylex05 @aadhube @destinycraftswords @writingwithoutconfidence and @winterandwords, and anyone else who wants to join in :)
Older poetry video I recorded and edited before my loooong break. I'm still happy with it. This poem is not about Berserk, but come on. How did I not include Guts in a poem about simmering, barely controlled resentment and rage?
Consider subscribing to my YouTube if you like spoken poetry, but hey. I'm not your boss.
Ps: left out a lot of context because it won’t be a film comic sadly enough. Maybe when I got more time outside of Uni because it’s fun; just the deadline that kills me🤷♀️
Could a Greek Hero Do...That?: Renew Their Driver's License
Could the famous heroes of Greek myth and legend renew their driver's license with minimal fuss? Are any of these people smart enough to have a driver's license IRL? Is the world ready for Athens Drift?!
Heracles: He doesn’t have to pay anyone or do anything, he’s like over six feet and jacked and is known to have killed a lot of people, his own kids included. The poor, poor workers at the license issuer/DMV just renew the license and give it back without charging a dime so he leaves faster
Odysseus: His insurance has gone up after a few...accidents, that weren’t his fault and were mostly because “no one” pissed off Poseidon. However, he is able to renew his license with little to no issue, even if he’s grumbling about how much he has to pay for insurance now
Theseus: Theseus is a clever clogs and really patient. He has to wait until the end of the day, but he calmly sharpens his sword as he waits and lo and behold, no problems at all since the employees have been watching him do that for the entire shift.
Bellerophon: Ever hear the song “I’ve a Horse Outside”? Yeah, that. No driver’s license, because fuck your honda civic, he’s got a horse outside (and it flies)
Perseus: He’s on the phone with Athena the whole time and his car has a suspicious dent from veering the car and hitting a Prius (or Acrisius badumtiss), but he gets his license renewed after he puts Athena on speaker phone and she negoiates for his insurance rates to stay the same despite said suspicious dent
