The Collégiale Sainte-Croix, built within the 11th century by Benedictines, is an ancient Catholic church located in the heart of Loudun, France, and was the main stage for the Possessed of Loudun Affair that happened in 1634. After making a pact with Isacaaron, Urbain Grandier had been appointed parish priest at the Church of Saint-Pierre-du-Marche just two minutes walking distance, haunted the Ursuline Convent and allowed a mass demonic infestation to irrupt. Many of the nuns, led by Sister Jeanne, manifested symptoms of hysteria, false pregnancy, and obsessed sexual fantasies. But Urbain had made several enemies prior, which would ultimately lead to the witch’s downfall, and was charged and executed by burning for his diabolical act.
“HA! — Are you kidding? The whole affair was pure ecstasy and getting to stretch my legs after so long within Asmodeus’s hellscape, it was practically freeing. Once I had caught the eye of Sister Jeanne, it was effortless. In the middle of the night, the witching hour, I would creep into the Convent to infect her dreams and soon all of the nun’s housed there. The seed was planted within each of them until finally I didn’t even need to do anything at all, they would find ways on their own to defy God and lust after those in their community. Child’s play! And though I lost my host, I earned a place closer to my King’s side.”
ustulation — a act of scorching, lustful passion, burning sexual desire // [listen here]
i.dance of death - andrew bird // ii.don’t worry, we’ll be watching you - gotye // iii.preface - taking back sunday // iv.earth death - baths // v.if i had a heart - fever ray // vi.animal - the acid // vii.cathedral - kitten // viii.fantasy - the xx // ix.bandwitch - broken social scene // x.hourglass - man man // xi.toes - glass animals // xii.bloodflood, pt.II - alt-j // xiii.superstition - the kills // xiv.i’m mad - the dead weather // xv.evil eye - franz ferdinand // xvi.two against one (ft. jack white) - danger mouse, daniele luppi // xvii.heart killer - gossling // xviii.not the sun - brand new // xix.royal jelly - deap vally // xx.wasting time (eternal summer) - four year strong
The Hahn Estate was built soon after their arrival to what was then known as the German Coastline of New Orleans, Louisiana, and is now one of the top tourist destinations within the city. Tradition was also kept from their days of prosecution and the family still continues to take in dislodged supernatural's, whose quarters are completely off limits to the constant bustle around the home. On top of the upkeep of the home, the family have their hands within the foundation of the New Orleans school system, political reigns, and several charity organizations. Their goal is to serve the supernatural community as leaders and protectors, a trait that remains as prominent as ever. Though that doesn’t keep the family from dabbling their hands at some tricks and treats.
“I grew up in an old, yet renovated, plantation style home in the bayou of Louisiana. Was built soon after my family settled into New Orleans and has been in my family for generations. Heh, actually— my favorite thing about living in that home for so long was Halloween each year and all the pranks my Dad would try to pull on us. Even the tours weren’t safe from his tricks. The yard was always cluttered with decorations, anything that my mother would let him get away with, and we would just have… groups of people basically waiting outside each year for that grand Hahn display. He still does it to this day, sends me photos of it all and there is always some new prank he’s trying out.”
kamikaze — a breach of peace // [listen here]
i.life itself - glass animals // ii.insane in the brain - cypress hill // iii.loser - beck // iv.where is my mind? - pixies // v.the writhing south - say anything // vi.dance... - johnny rain // vii.noise pollution - portugal. the man // viii.los ageless - st. vincent // ix.boredom - tyler, the creator // x.vhs outro - interlude - x ambassadors // xi.wonderful life - bring me the horizon // xii.rum - say anything // xiii.locust laced - sleigh bells // xiv.my favorite color - citizen // xv.vices - brand new // xvi.yellow cat (slash) red cat - say anything // xvii.p.u.s.s.y. - johnny rain // xviii.rocking horse - the dead weather // xix.rich kid blues - the raconteurs // xx.basket case - green day // xxi.woe - say anything // xxii.hash pipe - weezer // xxiii.tokyo drifting - glass animals
ft. @caspermhahn & @luciencredo
tw: vomiting, sickness, death, child neglect
It’s not a room, it’s an attic, and the hot Louisiana sun shone down onto the end of her bed from the large circular window in the middle of the room. Sne is eight years old. Everything was hot, the summer humidity making long strands of unbrushed hair stick to her. There’s a haze she can’t get through, makes her think that she can see the actual sunbeams. Maybe she can, maybe they’re magic and she can reach out to touch them. Her fingers reach out towards the end of the bed as much as they can without her sitting up-
Only for her to immediately haul herself into a sitting position in order to dry heave into the bucket on her nightstand. The noise alerts Antonella, all the sputtering and coughing and she thinks she’s crying. It’s a fatigue that’s bone deep, there’s nothing in her stomach, there’s nothing between her ears but fog.
As she grew older, she’d feel disgusted with herself for being relieved that her mother was at her side. Smoothing her hair back, pressing a wet towel to her forehead. There would be whole weeks like this. Days just spent in and out of the haze and she’d hear the words of her mother, feel the weight of her sitting on the edge of the bed.
*
She’s barefoot, she’s carrying a basket of mushrooms when she first meets him. She is thirteen and he’s so much taller than her, though she suspects they’re close in age. He also seems to be foraging and when he’s about to pick up a mushroom off of the forest floor, she bursts from out behind the tree she’d been clinging to. There’s a moment where they just seem to stare at each other and she feels small in her dirty dress with it’s hemline destroyed by the muck of the land. There is something there though, something like when she visits the older witches along the bayou. Magic, he has magic and she told him plainly that those were her mushrooms and without missing a beat, the boy said that it was his backyard.
Sure enough, she’d wandered off the path and onto a property, the Hahn house and its beautiful lawn was just up ahead, she could see it through the trees. He asks her if she’s lost, she stubbornly says no, he offers to walk her back home with this easy smile, the slightest twang. She accepts, let the consequences of running around with strangers be damned.
They walk into the yard, the boy calls to his mother on the porch who looks at her not with scrutiny, but with something else. Something soft and gentle, she doesn’t think any adult has ever really looked at her that way before.
The boy doesn’t look at her like that though. He doesn’t look at her like any boy has ever looked at her in her whole life. Like she was interesting, like she wasn’t some girl with a tattered dress and tangled hair and dirt beneath her fingernails. They were both odd, she found that out on the walk back. They had magic, they liked mushrooms and graveyards. He was Casper, like the friendly ghost, but she didn’t know what he was talking about, she’d never seen the film.
Years later they were watching movies in the dark parlor room and reading each other scary stories. Both still odd, but neither of them alone, not anymore.
*
She has no business being in a church when she has spent ample time defying the laws the Christian god put in place. But she kneels before the altar anyways, clothes black, hair sleek, and nails sharp. She is a far cry from who she had been back in New Orleans, the feral child. She’s a young woman, a more confident witch and when the vampire approaches her, asks to pray with her, she is not afraid. For she has always found comfort in dead things.
She asks to confess instead.
She tells him she doesn’t want revenge against a cruel mother, she wants power. Any task the woman has failed, Marcella wanted to rise above it. She thinks he sees some value in this ambition, she keeps coming back to a church she doesn’t believe in to speak to a man who feels like the closest thing she’s ever had to a father. He is someone her mother cannot rob her of, she regards him fondly regardless of what he is. When she starts making daylight rings, when she has perfected the spell, she gives him one that she’s forged herself.
It is solid and intricate, wrapped around a flat red stone, she always associates Mars with the color. She gives it to him the day she is leaving Rome to return to New Orleans where she will no longer be the ill child she once was. It is a promise that she will return to him again one day, braver, stronger.
She will accept nothing short of making him proud of her.
He remembered watching him in court from behind pillars, fingers clinging to marble, his heart racing. There wasn’t a lot of time, someone would surely notice he was not at his sparing lesson. But he wanted to see just a glimpse of him, of Aegnor beside his mother seated in her throne. There’s footsteps behind him as the two brothers manage to lock eyes. There is the faintest nod of acknowledgement, Farenduil grins, and then he’s off scurrying back to his lesson before he has to be lectured. Some days it’s like that, where he finds himself bored without his older brother to entertain him and as they’ve gotten older, they spend less and less time together. Sometimes Aegnor would tell him of the meetings he had, the people he met, all the rules he had to remember and Farenduil remarked that he couldn’t possibly do such a thing. His older brother had laughed and ruffled his hair, told him that he wouldn’t need to, that it was the job of a future king.
There were days they spent in the garden after sparring lessons, Aegnor made the sunflowers thrive and they were so tall that they could practically hide between the stalks. “Do you want to be king?” Farenduil had asked as they sat there in the dirt, vibrant flowers above them. His brother looked to him and there’s something somewhat weary in his expression, a crack in the usual armor.
He never got a response, someone called out for the would be king and he regretfully rose to his feet, ruffled his hair, and emerged from the flowers to where Dirthara was waiting for him.
When Aegnor died, when the news broke, he had ran past his weeping mother and he had gone right back to that patch of sunflowers and they’d browned and withered around him as he cried.
There was no need for Meryasek to do what he did, hide around pillars to avoid lessons or wait around for his attention. One day his younger brother had stepped right into a meeting and pulled at the sleeve of his shirt and Farenduil had quieted whoever was speaking just to turn to him. A conch shell was in the palm of his hand and without question, Farenduil had picked it up, put it to his ear, and nodded solemnly before putting it back and looking to the room. “We have important business to attend to.” And it’s with another nod that he rises from his seat and offers his hand to Meryasek.
They spend an ample time on the beach with a bucket that gradually fills with stones and shells, the waves lapping at their bare feet. The joy he gets from seeing Meryasek just simply exist is immense, enough to quell any anxieties he might have about his own future. There’s something beautiful in his younger brother’s smile when he runs up to him to hand him off another shell for inspection, it goes all the way up to his eyes. He wants to protect him from the rest of the world, he wants him to be happy like this forever. It’s why he drops everything whenever he enters the room, it’s why he will hold any meeting or fitting or put off a decision. He never wants him to feel that bit of loss he’d felt when Aegnor would be pulled away from him. He never wanted to see his own forlorn expression on Meryasek’s face. But the day does come where the same question he’d once posed to Aegnor comes from his younger brother’s lips.
“Do you want to be king?”
And because he cannot lie, Farenduil looks over to Meryasek and ruffles his curls, just as Aegnor used to do to him, and he tells a different truth. “Suppose someone has to do the job.”
“His name, Abelas. It means sorrow.
I told him: I hope you find a new name.”
trigger warnings: abuse, violence, death, fire
Abelas, Dirthara’s father, visited the grave rarely, but one quiet morning Dirth slipped from his bedroom and with cautious footsteps padded behind the man who pretended not to hear his son’s approach. Daylight was only an hour away and already the soft, warm hue of dawn was rising across the land. Barely beyond his first decade, Dirthara was practically an infant, incapable of performing even the most basic of spells, but capable enough in his father’s eyes to begin training.
“Sina na-” Abelas breathed as he stood before the piled stones that marked the place where the woman had long been buried. This is your fault. Dirthara froze in place, the casual cruelty tossed over his father’s shoulder was not uncommon and when he opened his mouth to speak he was silenced, he was a child, their life in the mortal realm was a happy one, the humans were young but Titania’s fondness for them was infectious. Infectious to all save for Abelas, perhaps. Their language was dying as they muddled their words with the human tongues, but Dirthara’s father spoke in nothing but the old tongue. Abelas was a hero to those who’d come before, but to the fey born in the mortal realm he was anything but. He was a cruel traditionalist with nothing but contempt for all, even his own son. Dirthara-Ma, it was a curse.
The air between them hummed and Dirthara moved to take a step back, but already a pair of spears, hot like a Summer fire, were growing from the earth between them.
“Dirthara-Ma: cost nin.” May you learn: Fight me.
*
“En.” Again
A pale rose grew from the place where Dirthara had been struck, the cruel end of his father’s stave came down hard, but every blow was meant to be a lesson. Fey grew in shorter bursts than humans, at six decades he was in his teenage years, but truthfully Dirthara had never been much of a child. Abelas had seen to that, taken the capricious upbringing of trickery that almost all fey were privy too. Something broke this time when Dirthara hit the ground, his father’s lessons had always been hard, cruel, and even in times like this - times of peace, Dirthara was pushed to the breaking.
“Eless ve polda-” Broken bones heal twice as strong. Abelas, would say. His words burned like the sun, you could look into his eyes and feel yourself go blind.
“En!” A hard strike and Dirthara felt his lithe frame flatten against the earth, his hand dug into the frost and the fire that grew in the place where they trained, squeezing the cold into his palm as if to weaponize it. His magic, their magic, was a flickering candle against the greater flames of the noble fey that stood above them. This was why he had to train, to make himself something that could be used, something that had value. Abelas was the greatest warrior the fey had ever seen, he’d walked at the side of the Queen herself as they came from Hyperborea to here, he held her in the end, and he blamed himself for being too weak to give his life in place of her own.
Soon Queen Titania would have a child and Abelas would push Dirthara before the prince that had been promised, to Aegnor to become his warder. He’d have to prove himself, he’d have to be ready. Another strike and Dirthara could feel the other’s contempt, the hatred that bloomed in the place of love.
***
May you learn. War had just as Abelas had predicted. It was not enough that the fey had loved humans like their own kin, nor that they’d once worked side by side with the druids and the witches. All that the fey had, they gave, but still there were those who wanted for more. Abelas had warned of this, their settlement burned and a horde descended upon the small faction.
Aegnor stood at Dirthara’s side now, both were men and fully grown, but Abelas looked towards the violent storm and grinned from ear to ear. Aegnor pulled back and drew hard on Dirthara’s collar, a motion that the winter fey only shrugged away.
“Your father plans to hold them off, he will rejoin us-”
“No,” Dirthara stated as he took a step towards the heat of the coming battle, Aegnor understood the passion of the fellow Summer fey, but Dirthara had known the coldness of the man just as aptly as the heat. The burn.
“Abelas-” Dirthara called out, “malas amelin ne halam.” He did not wait to see if his father would join him, all Dirthara’s life he would gaze into Abelas’ bright features and try to find some semblance of himself, but Abelas was an instrument that played a single note.
Task 001. A Memory from Childhood
Emory Starling, mid teens
Mentions of @emmaxmicah
Tws for demonic possession
The early evening air feels wet with humidity, it was due to rain soon, but that wasn’t going to keep him from being out there on the porch. The cabin was out of the way enough that they were alone in all directions for miles. It was the ‘safehouse’, not the nice one that was his mother’s that they actually camped at. It was easily repairable, didn’t have any valuables, and the sound of cicadas could almost drown out the screams coming from the house.
‘Scream Shack’, that’s what his younger brother called the cabin. Probably because it sounded like something out of those Harry Potter books he liked so much. Emory had never been able to get into them, it’d painted magic as something so whimsical, that’d never been his reality. Magic was being used right then and there in the house behind him to try and coax something out of a poor witch that’d summoned something without a proper salt circle. It was being used to contain the creature to the property, he’d checked the wards himself, kept walking them as his father and brothers worked.
It was all spells and chanting and reading out loud, a lot of call and response. He knew them, could lipsync along, had written them down for years. They didn’t let him do this part on account of being a kid, but Emory always thought it went deeper than that. His mother had said that they didn’t want him to see evil just yet. He’d never had the heart to tell her he thinks he’s already seen it in just everyday people
He walks around the cabin, his lips move silently around the spells and tries to ignore the screaming. They’ve been at this for hours, it usually took a while, he was prepared to be out here all night, they always were. That didn’t mean the stickiness of the air, the mosquitos, the sounds of the cicadas, from getting to him. When the screaming finally stops it’s abrupt. It’s as if somebody hit a mute button on the world. There’s no screaming, there’s no chanting, there’s just an eerie nothingness that stops him in his tracks and has him looking towards the cabin. Slowly he made his way back towards it and instead of going for the porch, he creeps past the side window. There’s hushed voices, his brother, his father, the family member of the young man who’d been possessed. His attention goes to the figure on the bed who seems to be staring at the ceiling as he tries to catch his breath.
As if sensing him at the window, the young man’s eyes flicker to him and he freezes completely. There’s no relief in the bright blues, there’s no panic, no fear. There was an emptiness, just vacancy and tear stains, a despair that he felt in the pit of his stomach. He looks away and he can’t help but feel ashamed somehow, like he’s seen something he shouldn’t.
The feeling doesn’t go away when his brothers pile with him back into the truck. He watches the cabin go from a building to a fading speck of campfire behind the trees to the soundtrack of The Who playing on the oldies station. When he gets home he glides past his mother who’d waited up for them in the living room and ignores his younger brother who is still up on his half of their room in favor of crawling into bed. He plugs in his headphones, he calls Emma, he doesn’t bother telling her what happened, he whispers to her to explain whatever new thing she’d found out about fey.
He is half listening to her with closed eyes, half thinking about those vacant eyes of the young man. He wants to ask her what she thinks of possession, if she thought it was weird he sometimes thought about human bodies as just vessels for something to come along into. If she thought the worst part of being possessed was the exorcism.
But he doesn’t say anything. Just listens to her talk until he falls asleep, all the while thinking what if the worst part was the loss?
“Tiania,” he called me,
“No,” my mother said. “Titania.”
He’s not my real father, but he loves me still, loves me enough to spirit me away from my home, watching from a palace floating in the sky. Elysia, we called it, but it was never for me. The man who calls himself my father is fit to remind me of this, he reminds me that had I not taken after my mother I’d have been left behind. From here I can see them suffering, and I know my mother sees it too. She hears them call to their queen, hears their cries late at night as chaos consumes them all one by one. Our once bright civilization is a blip in an eternal and circular history. I’m only a child, he tells me this too, and it’s in these moments where I raise my voice to his comforting golden orbs that my mother goes silent. It is, after all, her beauty that snared him, not her thoughts.
I think of this as I listen to my people crying out for help, I think of the flowers that disappeared one by one, I imagine myself as their hero - champion of the elves and the giants alike. My father leaves for battle, he and the other Gods descend upon some unknown place to wage a war that, while not for me, is something that my mother whispers that we will inherit. For so many years I thought of her like one thinks of statues, perfectly smooth but horribly dense. I see now that beauty can be both smart and deadly and it’s as I watch her shepherd all those who can walk into the realm that runs in between that I try to commit this to memory.
“Memory,” she whispers, “memory is never quite what we make it, is it my cricket?” Her lips are blue and her eyes sink lower and lower. “Did we make it?” She asks me, and I can feel the future breathing down my neck.
“Yes, I tell her. Yes, we made it.” I was a child when we left the realm before but I’m a grown woman now. Has it been a hundred years? A thousand? In a world where time has no meaning, where progress is benchmarked by grief and loss, it’s impossible to say how many days it has been. But we are few now. One less as I bury the last of my mother and let the magic she stole from my father take root. A tree grows in its place, and when I touch my heart to it I see our future, and I feel her with me still. I feel her promise: a home, a future, a hurricane of jacarandas. When I turn it’s to a convoy of kneeling fey, the giants are dead, our numbers are few, but we remain, and I am Queen, I am Titania.
