The season of love is back and I'm proud to announce the WoD Valentine's Exchange again for 2026! Submit up to TWO characters to receive a gift and create one for someone else in return! We welcome all mediums and styles.
Fill out an entry on the form with your OCs, provide as many details as you can, and include visual references.
**DEADLINES:**
Signups start January 24
Signups close and pairs are made on February 2
Earliest possible submission date is February 14
Last possible submission date is February 28
**GUIDELINES FOR REFS:**
- Please include at least 4 reference images as separate links or copy and paste into a Google Doc. Pinterest and other image sites also work.
- Reference images can contain art or photo references, such as face claims, outfits, art style inspiration, favorite things, etc.
- A link to a word doc with up to 500 words of details for one or both characters is also required. Write about their brief history, relationship dynamics, and other details your gifter should know.
**FRIENDLY REMINDERS:**
- All World of Darkness splats from any edition are welcome.
- Singles, platonic pairs, and friendships are valid.
- You can opt out of the Romantic theme for a theme-less gift.
- Non-OC, canon, and other people's OCs (with permission) are accepted.
- Writing, crafting, and other forms of media are encouraged!
- AI generated work is not permitted.
Sign Ups close on February 2nd when I will send out the matchups to everyone. When you are done, post your piece on Discord and/or socials and tag your gifter! Also use tag for this event #wodvalentines
Submitted pieces will begin being delivered on February 14th, Valentine's Day, with the last possible deadline being February 28th. You are free to post your piece on socials starting the 14th.
You will be contacted at least two times during the event: first to confirm your participation, second to check in and receive your final submission. Additional updates will be posted in the Discord art server: linkie here though participation is not mandatory. Crucial updates will always be posted here or sent to emails.
For questions or concerns, DM me here, email me at [email protected] or on Discord at vampy8020.
Here's the link to the form: https://forms.gle/VvzbbMmubfTXCo5HA
“You’ve always been a free spirit. No shame in it, dear. No shame in wandering, no shame in reaching. We’re human. It is what we do. I only ask… for all our sake… do not forget your anchor.”
“I know.”
“We were worried sick, dear.”
“I know.”
“...was it just you?”
“What?”
“The van. Was that only you?”
A oneshot centering @vandalblood's anarch Alice for the WoD Valentines community event!
Ao3 link for those who prefer that format
Otherwise, continue reading under the cut!
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alice.
With her name came a jest within the family– “Alice in Wanderland.”
Be it the park down the block or the private mystery of a home she was visiting, she would always split from the group. The joke continued that often all somebody had to do was glance away and off she would disappear through that looking glass only to emerge an hour later to be found poking around an attic, holed up within a department store clothes rack, or the underbrush of the densest thicket she could find.
Unlike her fictional counterpart however, she needed no white rabbit to guide her curiosity. Because of this it was easy to write off her curiosity as headstrong. Leave her be, off on her own, surely she will return once her explorative urge was sated.
For a time she believed this as well–taking her family and friends observations at face value, tucking them hidden but close in her breast pocket. Beat of a different drummer, they’d say. A wild spirit that needs its space to tire itself out, they’d mean.
Then she met Reed.
Kismet.
That’s when it clicked for her. It wasn’t the wild she was seeking–it was the companionship she found within it. Severed from the mundane procedure of the city, of social expectation–a connection that transcends those labyrinths of niceties in its sheer intensity.
He was her first love.
Only love, in life.
Passion for the ages!
Shame it wasn’t shared.
It was a good few months, a wild few months. She would run and he would chase–a game that quickly decayed into what he saw as a chore he did not have the energy for. Her constant wandering only reminded him of his own need to take root–to stay put. A tree that she would roost between her flights of fancy.
One day she returned to the nest that she had built among his branches in all her coming and going to find that it had been cleared. It was too much, he said, the coming and going. Nothing wrong, nothing bad, just a square peg and a round hole.
“I love you. I do. But I can’t keep this up.” “I don’t mind you don’t have to–”
“You deserve to be with someone who can.” Twigs, downy feather, pipecleaner and bauble–dashed across the earth, a nest pushed out of its roost in pieces. In the shade of that same tree, she found herself hastily gathering up those pieces of her broken heart and blindly riding the first gust that could carry her away.
—
“It was me. Just me, with the van.”
“We worried sick.”
“I know.”
—
Everything went into that van.
Every cent she could spend that wasn’t earmarked for food or gas went into retrofitting the back of an old ten passenger van into her own little mobile nest that stood no risk of being dashed. Wherever she would go, it would follow. A companion who would never tire, never excuse itself with that achingly polite cruelty Reed had struck her with.
When she hit the road, she consecrated the journey on social media. She and her new mobile partner wound through hollers, skimmed across swamps, and cut across Rocky spines. All along the way she collected stamps as badges at every stop that sold them–a fine, eclectic lining for the outside of her van. Each one a square inch of where she had been that she could carry with her no matter where she wandered. A way of keeping, a way of girding her nest against any future loss. Sure, she may have moved on. But whatever she touched, wherever she set foot, could always be carried with her in this way.
Months ticked by as her insta notifications ticked up with the mileage of her new home. Despite all this, Reed's shadow cast long across the highways and byways.
—
“What was it that you were doing?”
“Hm?”
“During the blackout. If it was just you… why didn’t you pick up the phone?”
“I–”
“Did you even check?”
—
Further west, in the vast yet frigid expanse that the desert would become come midnight, she met Montgomery.
A fellow traveller she had crossed paths with one evening on a late night hike. She had gotten turned around at one of many forks in the path and he, showing off a familiarity with the land that bordered on intimate, set her back on the right path.
She invited him to join her at her campfire.
He gladly accepted.
They talked through the night.
Alice knew there was something odd about Monty. At first she wrote it off–figuring it was a similar oddness as her own. This must be what it's like, she thought, to meet a fellow wanderer. A bit awkward, a bit disassociated–but ultimately a warm and welcome break from her self imposed isolation. But as the small hours rolled on the oddness became a growing unease. He had a way of staring at her for too long. Listening too intently. Where she answered his questions, he would sidestep hers with unrelated yarns.
“Have you watched the sun set in the Rockies? The purple–everything the light touches dyed royal for a handful of minutes. It’s been a while. Tell me what you saw. I miss it, I really do miss it.”
She never got the chance to ask why he missed it.
What it was that kept him from seeking it again.
She didn’t even get to say her goodbyes.
Alice had looked away for a moment, only a moment.
It only took a moment.
The embrace took her like a cougar takes a buck–swift and brutal.
In hindsight she was thankful it was so sudden. It lives in her memory as a white hot flash of pain before her shallow grave turned over, her body got back up.
Turns out Monty truly was an odd one, because he did end up sticking around.
“It’s a lot. I know. I’d say to just breathe but– yeah, I know, shitty joke.”
Looking back, it was clear why he did what he did. If not her, it would’ve been the next young thing he stumbled upon. If there was one thing she had understood as well as a kindred in life, it was that aching need for connection. That was her justification, at least, for sticking around with the creature that had just ripped her throat out.
Monty travelled well with the van, just as so many stamps before him.
He was who taught her to hunt, taught her how to haunt national park trails as to intercept the perfect prey at any given fork or crossroads. Taught her how to lure in coyotes and cats for the more out of the way corners where kine were scarce. Guided her in covering her tracks, disengaging from the social media that had been her one tether to her life before. It was for her own safety, you see. Their own safety.
Monty was always glancing over his shoulder when he thought she wasn’t looking.
Her phone started going off–calls, texts, pings… eventually, she started seeing her face passed around on social media.
MISSING.
LAST SEEN 4/19 AT BACKBONE ST. PARK
IF FOUND CALL–
Monty advised she turn off her phone. Remove the battery.
She told him she would, but never dead.
Even freshly dead, her touchstones across the country were already calling to her. Her people, her place– they were hers, every square little inch of them. Even after all this time, with all that distance she had put between them and herself. Monty, as pleasant as he could be, proved himself paranoid, unanchored and twitchy.
Is this what Reed saw, when he looked at me?
Rootless to the point of getting lost in the night?
Monty never stopped moving.
She never stopped moving.
“They shoot wolves like us from choppers, out here. You can’t just hide in the mountains like you used to. They can reach you anywhere, these nights.”
Weeks of conjuring up phantoms over shared campfires. It was no wonder then, that those very spectres eventually manifested before them in the flesh.
The Inquisition announced itself as a pair of headlights in Alice’s rearview one evening.
They were travelling the backroads, fishing for hitchhikers. A perfect mirror of their own movements, it shadowed them between sparsely populated towns in the Montana backcountry. Monty didn’t say anything, he didn’t need to. In their short time together she had learned how to pick up on his tension, to brace when his focus morphed into a fixation that sucked the oxygen out of the van.
Unfortunately, gas tanks aren’t bottomless. When the gas light came on, Monty placed a hand on Alice’s knee. He did not take his eyes off the rearview. He did not bother to draw in his claws as they threatened to pierce through the thin material of her patchwork skirt.
“When you park, hide in the back. I’ll get the gas. If they engage, I’ll divert them west. If they take the bait and chase me off the lot, hijack it back east– I’ll catch you at the next BP once I lose them in the woods.”
The car–a rusted Toyota Camri–hugged her bumper all the way to the pump. When she cut the engine, she slid into the back and he out the drivers door. He didn’t even make it to the pump before they were out and on him. She could not see the struggle from where she was pressed against the van’s floor, hidden under a spare quilt. A violent outburst that went as quickly as it came–when she poked her head back into the driver’s cabin, the only evidence left of an altercation was a smear of blood where a body must’ve hit the concrete curb of the pump. The Hunter’s car was still idling–headlights still set to their highbeams–with no driver in sight.
No Monty in sight, either.
If her heart still beat, it’d be screaming as she fired up her van and slammed on the gas. Adrenaline flooding her undead brain, affording her tunnel vision as she tore away east. The BP Monty mentioned, thankfully, was only a few miles off, sparing her the worry of hitting an empty tank. It was early morning still, at the next station. She filled her tank, and staked out in the drivers seat watching the treeline.
Monty never emerged.
As the hours crawled ever closer to dawn, however, she was not alone.
—
“Where did that magpie come from, anyway?”
“I–found her by the road. I didn’t want to leave her.”
“A travel pet?”
“I guess you could call her that.”
—
The magpie, like her, like Monty, was odd. Unlike other animals it lacked the survival instinct, the beast sense. The little thing sat with her, kept her company. Perhaps it had been another kindred’s famulus, perhaps it somehow sensed her distress. Whatever the reason, as dawn threatened to break the horizon, Alice was compelled to keep her.
Compass.
She bestowed the name along with her blood, of which the creature partook with the same intensity she had partook in Monty’s. She watched over Alice’s body throughout the day, a tiny guardian until night once again fell across the small gas station’s backlot. When Alice rose again, she was surprised her van hadn’t been towed.
Perhaps another instance of synchronicity–or perhaps whoever was supposed to work that day skipped their shift. Either way, when the sun had set and Monty had yet to show his face, Alice took the separation as a sign.
New York was calling her.
Her touchstones, her flock.
—
“...We’re just happy to have you back, regardless.”
“I’m happy to be back–I’ve missed you dearly. All of you.”
“Promise you won’t disappear like that again?”
—
They shoot wolves like her from choppers, out west.
Perhaps back east, back home, she could hide as a sheepdog.
Perhaps.
—
Alice took their hand. Squeezed it between her own.
“Never. This is where I want to set my roots. Here. With you.”
