To clear up any confusion, all the characters in Garden of Bones (Knoppegarten) are based on real people.
It's just passed a year since Michel started recognising symptoms of epilepsy and DID while we were going through the wringer. The former has been tested and diagnosed; we're working on the latter. Mental healthcare is prohibitively expensive in Australia.
My poor shitty little phone camera did its best, but anyway: Weaver is a Sphynx type fae, and by a wide margin the absolute scariest when they get angy.
Everyone is traumatised, and Weaver gets all the hypervigilance. Sleep deprived crankyfeathers.
Puck was inspired from, formed in, and betrayed by love. He broke so irreparably that Servitor_Rex, his predecessor and ultimate successor, was forced out of a very old grave to manage the fallout. It was messy and violent; Puck became tyrannical towards the other fae; Rex didn't have the presence of mind to do anything other than retaliate.
Now that their reconciliation is properly underway, and Puck no longer bears the weight of the heartstone, he patrols the Garden as a vigilant ghost; the vengeance of the pain he suffered, which Rex now guards in his own chest; and serves as a shepherd/big brother/party clown for the lesser fae.
When Puck smells lamp gas, or hears crocodile tears, his bells start to jingle. Everyone hears the noise, particularly Rex.
good morning gothic romance is one of my favourite flavours of horror.
Anyway, following from this bit of world building, Bonesy throws Rex their V card (V is for Vulva) and when the dogman is a weretree, obviously it means grotesque mutations if his blood pressure goes up.
Servitor Rex lands with a SPLAT on the windscreen of an unsuspecting motorist, traveling at highway speed down the M3. “Ryan!”
The driver’s name is not Ryan; he screams.
“Ryan I need the car, get in the passenger side!”
“WHAT THE FUCK”
“I SAID GIMME THE CAR”
Wearing nothing but a pair of jeans one size too big, Rex clambers in via the driver’s side window, too fast and too small for the motorised glass to forbid his ferret-like squirming. Thankfully, not-Ryan is present enough of mind to swerve onto the shoulder and judder the car to a halt, grinding the front bumper against the guard rail. His full-volume objections go unheeded as Rex kicks him to the opposite side of the cabin, with far more wiry strength than his tiny, fatty frame belies.
“Aurgh, of course it’s a fucking manual,” Rex growls, and struggles impotently with the gear stick.
Not-Ryan is still screaming profanities, pressed against the passenger door to maximise the distance between himself and the clearly unhinged, dog-faced Fae who just hijacked his vehicle, and is now attempting a clumsy, grunting dance with the uncooperative clutch.
The chaos rattling around inside the cabin is interrupted by a thunderous tremor, vibrating up from the ground beneath them.
Then another, boom. Scrape; boom; scrape, rhythmic, as something titanic approaches from the rear on claws and legs big enough to disrupt the surrounding traffic.
Both occupants turn to look through the back window, in time to shriek in unison at the serpentine figure bearing down on them teeth-first.
CRASH, as a spidery, articulate hand the span of the entire car slaps down on its roof, cracking every window and irreparably buckling both axles. “REX, YOU SQUIGGLY FUCK” the serpent howls; Rex and not-Ryan redouble their screaming, before the driver’s side door is pinched in half and ripped from the hinges.
Another, similarly arachnine hand reaches into the car and wraps around Rex in his entirety, squeezing just enough to deflate his mania with a little squeak! He kicks formlessly as he’s pulled from the driver’s seat, leaving nothing behind but the thumps and honks of his bullet-like feet striking at least every square inch of the front console.
By now, it’s all not-Ryan can do to hyperventilate; the air hitches in his lungs as the serpent’s colossal face makes its appearance in the gaping void left by his car door. Human features, unsettlingly soft and smooth around those horrible pointed teeth, regard him with a matronly kind of exhaustion.
“I am sincerely sorry, he has a seizure condition. Let me get you my details, for the… the car stuff. I have a guy.” Its voice is too smooth and lilting to pick a gender, unlike Rex, who looks and sounds like a bogan vampire — despite his petulant screaming having returned at a helium pitch.
In all the confusion, not-Ryan latches on to a concept more foreign to him than the existence of Fae at all, which is barely news in the era of camera phones. “Wait—Fae can have seizures?”
The serpent’s statuesque face was withdrawing, but the promise of an impromptu lecture brings its aquiline Germanic nose front and centre once more. Huge, pale yellow eyes peer into the rumpled cabin. “Oh! Yes, and Rex is right from the taproot of our tree, so actually his spasms hit all of us. It’s quite fascinating, in fact—”
Not-Ryan half-listens, figuring himself more or less a captive audience, while his wider awareness registers the rest of the serpent’s pied coils compressing into a more catlike form under the initial forty-or-so feet of muscular neck.
“— And I’m forced by necessity to bear down on mine, so of course I have constant pounding headaches while I have to deal with his dissociative episodes—”
“Dissociative episodes, uh-huh,” not-Ryan mutters, eyes flickering around for signs of where the serpent stashed its prey. He hasn’t decided which one is the more present threat: the titanic Sphynx making a resting spot of the entire highway while it vents its frustrations; or the tiny, hyper-manic dogman who seems to be some kind of literally spastic escape artist, smuggling a frightening amount of lean muscle and compacted rage.
“—I could go into the nitty-gritty of Fae physiology, all the interlinked psychic viscera, the somato-sensory homunculus, shapeshifting and dysmorphia, etcetera—”
Actually, the long-winded hyperfixation is helping not-Ryan locate his own frantic pulse again, and he’s able to start absorbing specific details — like the serpent’s magpie-styled fur and disturbingly graceful fingers, as it gesticulates with (he counts briefly) at least eight arms. He finally spots the captive hijacker, and breathes a sigh of relief; it’s far more comforting that ‘Rex’ is visibly accounted for, lest he airdrop on a less experienced driver.
“S-sorry,” not-Ryan begrudgingly interrupts, “you said something about—about fixing my car?”
The Sphynx-Fae blinks a couple of times and makes an exasperated “nguh” noise, shaking off the word-vomit. “Of course, I’m so sorry. My name is Weaver, let me just— uh. Hold on, I have no pockets—” two or three arms disappear into the fur… feathers… coat of Weaver’s neck, which begins rustling around like they’re looking for something. One arm darts back out and places a pair of low-profile spectacles atop that proud nose.
Not-Ryan points a hesitant finger at Rex, who has since stopped thrashing and looks suspiciously limp in Weaver’s sinewy grip. “He okay? Or uh. Alive?”
It pauses in its rifling and turns its attention to Rex, who has been absent-mindedly compressed for the last few minutes. Embarrassment flashes across its ambiguously feminine features. Sitting upright, Weaver relaxes its grip and examines Rex for a moment, well above not-Ryan’s field of vision.
Rex appears well and truly unconscious, his limbs dangling uselessly from between Weaver’s fingers. It takes a moment to appraise him; consternation twists up its features briefly. A free hand gingerly rises up as if to poke him awake, before prod, prod, prod, precisely ten times at random spots on his torso, and Rex’s floppy ragdoll is lifted to one side of Weaver’s head. They release a frustrated little huff from the nostrils, mouth pressed into a thin line.
Not-Ryan squints his confusion at the weird silhouette before him.
BR-R-R-R-INGGG
“Agh fuck me, Jesus!”
Bones is shocked alert by the brassy ring-tone, which seems to come from everywhere in the treehouse. They plug one saucer-sized ear with a pinky, and raise a piece of yellow fruit to the other.
“Banana phone, what’s up.”
“Can you check Rex’s vitals for me?” Weaver’s exasperated voice bounces around in Bones’s primordial skull.
“Chrissakes, did he take off again? Hang on,” the banana phone is lashed under a convenient headband for hands-free correspondence, so that Bones can start tapping away at the immense console built into their work station. “Swear to fuckin’ god, lose track of that cunt for five fuckin’ minutes—”
“I got him before he caused any serious damage, but we owe somebody a new Camry and there’s some havoc on the motorway.”
“I call an entire fuckin’ car ‘serious damage’!”
“Not compared to the first incident.”
Bones pauses in their tapping and sets their jaw for a moment, conceding that point without argument. Hiding the carnage from the police was a day-long job. “I suppose as far as cars go, a Camry is pretty easy to fix up. His vitals are fine, looks like an adrenaline crash.”
Weaver heaves out a sigh of relief. “Good, I was worried I squeezed a bit hard… he’s gone very limp, normally he doesn’t sleep this well.”
“Just hard enough, apparently. Crush his soul back into his body, all that good autsy shit. Anyway.”
As promised, Weaver exchanges “information” with not-Ryan, in the form of what appears to be a holographic tarot card with some kind of nursery rhyme hand-written on the back. “Speak this out loud into a mushroom ring to get in contact with our correspondence guy. Name of Bonesy, looks a bit like a spider monkey with too many legs.” This being the first time he’s been involved in a traffic incident with some Fae, not-Ryan is more relieved that he still has skin and teeth.
Pay What You Want sketch bust commissions open, 10 slots available at a a time. DM me to express interest! You chuck any amount of money at me, I draw a character of your choosing in the above style.
