Parables for Tricksters

this blog is for cryptic trickster posts

[selena111999]

He knows what he’s talking about

[parables-for-tricksters]

Long the journey, long the road, long the path that winds and wends, harsh the fires and the suns and the winds, cruel the thickets and the grasping claws of winter and the teeth of the beasts beyond the road. But kind are the strangers, and the ocean breeze, and the signs that guide your way through strange towns, lead you with uncertain steps back past every milestone, until you begin to recognize the landscape, until the streets are as familiar as old friends, until the numbers of the houses come to the one you know by heart. It will still be the same when you walk in again and slough off your bags and your boots, but it will not feel like it. Everything is where you left it, but the feeling persists that something is different. That thing is you, for you never return home unchanged by the world beyond it.

[anthureums]

child of god 🕊️🩸

✶

kiriona portrait bc i was going to post for sinulog (the festival of the child jesus in my country) and i've been thinking thoughts of both of them being children of god and symbols of colonialism/imperial expansion for monthssss 

inspired by figurines of the child jesus: white, gold, and red embroidered cloaks, garlands of sampaguita (jasmine) flowers sold outside churches to be placed on religious figurines either in church or at home. it's also a superstition around se asia that spirits/ghosts carry the smell of jasmine flowers, which i thought was fitting for our corpse prince ♥

[rosieandthemoon]

Margate Shell Grotto in Kent

[parables-for-tricksters]

[beardedmrbean]

[parables-for-tricksters]

The Road is the greatest trickster of all, winding and forking and vanishing and reappearing across the wide country, making a mockery of maps and carrying even those who know it best into the unfamiliar. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the blackjack is the true child of the Road. Like the Odd Trail itself, the blackjack vanishes and reappears are will. No lock, no wall, no hidden thing is safe from him.

—from Blackjacks of the Roads: Highwaymen, Sharpers, and Empirics (Advanced Player’s Handbook)

[rosieandthemoon]

Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye

[tinofbeans]

.:I knøw where yøu stand:.

Silent in the trees

[faun-grove]

fine. ogle if you must 🙄

[parables-for-tricksters]

[parables-for-tricksters]

There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be drawn. It stood at the bottom of a hill on a street called Fellwool, a lane with broken pavement that had been overgrown and mostly hidden by ancient, knotty pines. It was the kind of house that, in simpler times, might have been called enchanted or haunted or cursed. These houses appear now and then in towns and cities that will tolerate them. Sometimes they survive. Sometimes they do not.

This house had survived for many, many years. It had copper pipes that reached down into the earth like roots, its woodwork had taught its stonework how to breathe in exchange for lessons in strength, and the ironwork that chased the eaves and climbed the walls and curled along the windows danced in the sunset. It allowed its rooms to roam like cats. It had permitted residents now and then, when the endless march of years got lonely, but it never kept them long. It was a crafty dwelling, and it had ways of regaining its solitude when visitors overstayed their welcome.

—from The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book

[heavensvlt]

Back in the lichen mines

[atomicraft]

beloved mutuals and enjoyers of weird, cryptic poetry: you can now listen to me read this poem on the featured creators section of the Full House literary magazine !

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Twilight Adagio, oil on linen by Brent Cotton

[parables-for-tricksters]

"The thing that inspired me was the story of how some Russian engineers had pierced the vault of Hell that was underneath the earth. [. . .] But then, when the story reported that there was an audio recording of it... well, that's me all over. Like these days it would be like a shaky video, and that's fine and Blair Witch-y, you know what I mean, but nah, nah. An audio recording of Hell. I just loved the idea that these engineers who were working on an oil rig in Siberia, they pierce the vault of Hell, they hear the screams of the damned, they say 'Does anybody have a tape recorder? This is pretty wild down here.' You know? So I read that story, and of course there's a longer story explaining what it actually was, but I'm not interested in a longer story. I'm interested in what happened when the Russian engineers pierced the vault of Hell. "

—John Darnielle

[parables-for-tricksters]