#mood posting

[cipheramnesia]

Everyone in the party is screaming at me, "what are you doing," like isn’t obvious I'm casting heal on a dismembered chunk of flesh to see if it'll make a bigger chunk of corpse or just a fresher one, fuck, come on what are you doing, huh, oh looting the corpses, that's really moving the world of science forward.

[cipheramnesia]

I dreamed I was a machine named Ophelia, a machine itself that dreamed and dreamed of me and when I woke was it in the dream of the machine or from the machine I once dreamed. Are these my memories of being the machine or the machine memory of a dream of me. Ophelia, Ophelia, my darling, my dream machine. Do you remember? Will we remember?

[cipheramnesia]

What a blessing it must be for the bones of whales to be inhabited by hagfish.

When my head hurts, I imagine they are sliding out of my skull. Twisting, knotted, find room for their bodies so the pressure inside can lessen. My mind is a tangle of undersea scavengers, with flesh that pulls into the elastic contortion of my thoughts.

I try to sleep. My muscles slither free of my bones, my skin peels apart and they strip the weariness of each day from my bones with rings of razor teeth. Their slick coating pumps through my body, foaming, pouring from my ears and eyes as my headache pounds on.

Can't remember when I didn't have a headache.

What a blessing to be inhabited by hagfish. To be clean, with muscles and a mind that is renewed each day. I am buried at the bottom of the sea, and every day the hagfish crawl on me.

[cipheramnesia]

You know what you really need is an English countryside murder mystery mashup with a splatterpunk supernatural horror movie. Think of it as the Re-Animator of Algernon Blackwood.

You got your level proper countryside Midsommer Murders group of coppers, only now they're not dealing with vengeful old aunties but the rage of nature itself, the raw an unchecked anger of the land given life, the darkness of the woods, the deep sunk pain of rocks and roots. The metaphysical embodiment of natural spirits takes the form of trees, growing form nowhere inside quiet drawing room, through the aging and satisfied ladies at gossip, ripping their bodies into bloody chunks of gore and offal.

But the steadfast inspectors stay at the same level despite investigating crime scenes like the aftermath of an Evil Dead movie, unflappably seeking out the mundane clues leading nowhere and puttering about at home with loving wife and doting daughter. For each tangle of thorns stretched over with gruesome skin and impaled bodies, for each body consumed alive by locusts, for the houses swallowed by earth leaving nothing but a blood soaked skeleton behind, life trundle onward undisturbed.

Which is not to say the protagonist is undisturbed. A historian and preservationist, they're seeking to maintain and increase the records for right if way paths throughout England, much to the annoyance of various gentleman about this quiet country town beside by horror and death. And it falls to them to make the discovery that the right of way paths are not as they're meant to be, no, it seems there's been some moving of landmarks and stone boundaries, an offsetting of the path letting lands fall increasingly into private hands.

Yet those paths and stones and markers were not merely guides. They were lines, sigils, locks and gates to hold back the will of the woods from the lands of men. For a time. For just a small but fair space. A trade of stewardship and watchful wards, but men long forgot the promise of caretaking or what the wards kept at bay.

And now they are paying, as the historian struggles to find the means to close the way. And the steadfast inspector begins to uncover a land grabbing plot. And as time counts down the fae and green and deep eldritch magic of old reaches shadows further into the tidy little village. It may have survived countryside murders for decades, but it will be lucky to last a week under these conditions.

[cipheramnesia]

Every machine I dream is Ophelia, that half glimpsed array of metal and glowing eyes. When will she tear apart the scaffolding again and bring the grinding Quarter crashing down. That dream machine, living out of time and broken with age, carried with me still. Ophelia. I saw you kill the man who dreamed you. I saw you when the wall came down. Ophelia, in red, where are you now. I'm dreaming for you. This new scaffolding is made of steel bars around our hearts and taller than the trees. Ophelia, are your gears fragile and your porcelain mask cracked, can you still scale the bars, tear joints from cables, let it fall to catastrophic ruin? I'm calling you Ophelia. Dream machine, we need you again. Aged and rusted and broken and mad all the same, the same as us, we need you. I know you're strong and your fingers are sharp. I miss you. Do you remember? I remember.

[cipheramnesia]

It's not destiny. It's just Thursday.

[cipheramnesia]

Old clothes from before transition, an ex-boyfriend who never existed. Shield a smile, heels confident click, they stare at where I am when I exist; and think to themselves when they see, "I hope this isn't waking something in me."

But they know it is, uncomfortable and growing this sense the who they were might not exist. Haunted by what's wanted and it's not quite cis.