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synopsis: The dead don't stay dead. They linger in the corners of your eyes. Whisper in cold winds. Memories of the dead scorch themselves in that soft gooey part of the mind; a cigarette burn in their memories. The dead don't stay dead. Some of them know no peace. Some of them never rest... and you won't either.
genres: thriller, horror, mystery, crime
MINORS DNI, very dark and mature themes throughout this blog so 18+ only. may be heavily triggering for some and warnings would be: mentions, descriptions, and images of ghosts, crime scenes, death, mental illness, and gore. please be safe and curate your space accordingly.
THE IRON SPINE is best known for its sailors. Fearless and capable, those born on the IRON SPINE have made livings off of shipping trade goods through the MÍRABAEM SEA. Known for its rough and troubled seas and unpredictable storms, the MÍRABAEM is a sea of monsters and those able to sail and navigate the disorientating and deadly ocean are those who live within it, those on the island known as the IRON SPINE.
NACHIN was raised by stone and cold. Steep cliffs have nurtured steady feet and without the safty or rope or step was crafted an unbreakable spine, and unyielding spirit. Born amid the jagged walls of the black crags, NACHIN has never known fear. Never learned hesitance. These lessons are meant to prepare her for a destiny written into the oldest MARSHIY, as deep and clear as the day it was writ. In the rubble of the First Breaking.
Synopsis:ㅤ A crafted weaving of all our favorite fantasy tropes: ancient evils, prophetic visions, moral ambiguity, war and loss, monsters and gods, found family, all of it threaded with multiple characters of different cultures and backgrounds. Witness the fall of a monumental empire through injustice, revenge, bloodletting, and hope.
Genres: epic fantasy, adult fantasy, sci-fi fantasy... insert other subgenres here
*Features a diverse world of unique but familiar cultures, beliefs, and settings. Introduces readers to a world of monsters, gods, and men. an exploration into the desperate hold onto hope, the breaking points of characters and readers, and the consequences of fate/destiny.
Rotten things smell sweet at first. No one talks about that. Odhran knew the difference. Rot sure smelled sweet in those first moments but once that Sick got in deep enough it churned a vile foulness that stained everything around it black. Deep in the wood Odhran stepped into fetid air. He'd tracked it far enough nothing sweet was left, all rotted and festered from here. There wasn't a need to be quiet, no reason to watch for twigs or mind the wind. The danger had all gone by now. Odhran only needed to walk a few more meters before he found it; roped through with black roots and bubbling foulness were the cracking bones of something not quite dead but nothing close to living. An eye tracked the hunter's movements from where it hung over a lower jaw bone. When Odhran stepped to close and wind pushed from a fluttering lung, its other half shriveled into nothing beside it. Somewhere under the blackened green moss Odhran heard it. A steady, rhythmic thunder. The Rot comes and softens the meat, draws in the curious, the vulnerable, and then comes the Sick. And the Sick won't ever leave.
The words cut through the scuzz of anxiety. They were cheery and bright, like a neon post-it note slapped happily on top of the inbox of my brain.
That was Sprout for you. It was a little ball of wonder and excitement. It looked at every mundane facet of the world (and of me) with the wide eyes of a hippy who’d just had Baby’s First Psychedelic Experience on watered down ayahuasca.
To put it a bit less cynically: it liked, y’know… things.
“Hey. Hey buddy,” I replied falteringly. It was hard to make the words crystalise in my mind when my amygdala was slathering every thought with a viscous rainbow of internal screaming. Damn lizard brain; not every thought needs an outer layer of birthday cake-flavoured anguish, y’know?
“Hi Mir!” Sprout did not falter. I don’t think it knew how. “I just think it’s really cool that you like that person so much. Like, you really care what they think about you! That’s great.”
“I… huh.”
“Like, dang. It's intense in here, though. Y'know, not loud exactly?” Sprout paused. I could feel it reaching around in my psyche, spreading itself out into the cracks and fissures of my neuroses. “It's … staticky. It's like that time that band put the microphone too close to the speakers and everyone flinched. But kinda slower?”
“It's called anxiety, Sprout. It's like fear on twenty-five percent speed.”
“Wow. It wasn't even this intense when you met me! And you were being eaten then…”
- - -
I'd picked up Sprout in the outer reaches of the Dreamlands, right where the imagined meets the unimaginable. We call it the Nyx Line. It’s the place where stuff from outside dreams tries to get in, which is not always optimal. For every harmless intrusive thought or ‘where did that come from?’ bit of subconscious psychodrama, there’s a psychic hazard with a maw as wide as creation and a hunger as bottomless as Dis.
Us Weavers have a loose rota in place to patrol it. It’s like a chore wheel with added odds of being consumed from the anima outwards. A ‘vore wheel’, if you will (but why would you).
It’s not exactly a border, per se – it’s more of a *membrane*. By which I mean: it’s permeable, perilously thin and weirdly wet. It’s also a moving target, because why wouldn’t it be? The limits of what we can imagine changes on the daily and varies from dreamer to dreamer, so the patrol route gets a bit conceptual.
Anyhow, it was my shift and I happened across a real nasty piece of abstract horror. How to put this? It was kind of a cross between a parasitic fungus and an emotion sideways of envy and north of paranoia. It made you feel like the whole world was out to get you, but also that you were painfully aware that you didn’t have the kind of motivation to be out to get *anyone*. Oh, and also it was using these weird mycelial fangs to try and bite a chunk out of my superego and climb inside (no, I do not know why it targeted my superego in particular).
In the end, I managed to subdue it by snaring its fungal teeth with my needles and knitting the whole thing into a closed loop. It ate itself out of existence.
But… I wouldn’t have managed that if it wasn’t for Sprout. I don’t really know what Sprout is. It’s one of the more abstract entities I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t even really have a form; it’s more like an idea of an idea. A proto-concept. A metaphor that doesn’t mean anything yet, but really wants to.
Sprout distracted the intruder long enough for me to snag it. In return, I agreed to let it hitchhike across the Nyx Line with me.
Anyways, back in the present…
- - -
“Yeah. Anxiety’s an odd one, bud. It’s evolutionary, mostly.” I repeat the words mostly by rote, meanwhile my brain chews over Sprout’s words in the background. “When we met, I was scared because I could see something was trying to eat me. I knew it was there. It was scary, but I could see the threat, right? Whereas anxiety is a warning about the doom you can’t see yet. It’s an alarm that lets you know the signals aren’t adding up and the maths aren’t maths-ing, but it’s all still subtextual. The tiger’s hidden in the reeds still, but a bit of you remembers that when the reeds rustle like that… it could be doom-time.”
“Huh.” Sprout stopped reaching around in my temporal lobes and contracted into a little amorphous puddle of puzzlement. “It doesn’t feel like a tiger to me.”
“Could’ve fooled me…”
“It doesn’t taste like tiger, though. Like, Mir, it’s the same shape as tiger-doom. But you don’t like tigers. You like that person. You really like them. It’s got that cherry taste like endorphins or fizzy sugar drink. Why would that make the doom-shape?”
It was a struggle to finish digesting the thoughts and still mentally enunciate my words. So I opted to just let the thoughts fill in the blanks of the sentence and see what came out…
“Because I don’t want them to hate me. Because I’d hate it if they hate me. Because of all the times people I’ve wanted to like me have ended up hating me instead. Because when I care about someone, I usually fudge it up, so caring becomes a sound like a rustle in the reeds that promises doom…”
There was a moment of quiet, as both Sprout and sat and looked with wide eyes at the words that I’d formed.
“I’m sorry, Mir.”
“Why’s that, Sprout?”
“It sucks that caring can hurt you.”
I conjured the memory of a deep release of long-held breath. I untensed and let the tangles in my anima untease themselves.
“It’s okay, Sprout. It’s actually… kind of helpful to realise.”
“Realise what?”
“Sometimes the anxiety isn’t just maladaptive fear, it’s also maladaptive care.”
“Hmmm.” Sprout squirmed. It always got squirmy when it was thinking through something new. “Do you want me to eat the anxiety? I could make sure I left the ‘care’ bit!”
“Tempting, Sprout. But they’re probably a bit knotted together. I should unravel them before we go doing psychic surgery with teeth for scalpels…”
“Okay. Let me know if you change your mind. Oh, and Mir…”
“Yeah?”
“You like them! You liiiiike them! Mir likes somebody!”
I blushed.
Maybe I could let Sprout eat my sense of embarrassment instead…
---
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Chapter excerpt from WIP urban fantasy novel The Restless Forest (working title. I've gone off it.). Niamh is searching for a Trow (an ancient creature from Scottish mythology) in the City Below, in the hope of answers to who may have poisoned the City's trees and why. Currently, they are travelling through the unnerving Underwood.
Part of Niamh had been hoping that the Underwood would provide a relief from the constant claustrophobia and unsettling strangeness of the City Below. That hope didn’t last very long.
“Oh, what is that smell?!” Niamh exclaimed, on stepping through the heavy iron portal. “It smells like the place that mushroom soup is sent to die”.
The Underwood looked at first like a forest seen in the blue gloom following the sunset. A directionless glow suffused the space, making everything appear strangely flat and grey. Mighty trunks and crawling roots filled the space, meaning Niamh couldn’t get an idea of how far the chamber might extend. The ceiling was a little higher than in the rest of the City Below, but nowhere near high enough to encompass mature trees. At around twenty feet above the ground, the trees met the smooth stone of the ceiling. There they merged seamlessly into the rock. This meant that the Underwood was a wood without leaves. Just the brown and greys of ash, oak and elm bark as far as the eye could see. As is if to make up for this lack of colour, an astonishing array of fungi grew everywhere. Brackets, caps and funnels sprouted and hung from every surface. In place of undergrowth there was a riot of mushrooms. Where Niamh might have expected to see ivy clinging to the tree trunks, bracket fungus grew in bulbous spirals. It was beautiful, in an uneasy sort of way.
Hazel screwed her eyes up, behind her steel rimmed spectacles, and gave Niamh’s flippant question more consideration than it perhaps deserved.
“In the absence of sunlight, much of the flora down here is fungal in nature. That combined with the lack of ventilation would likely give rise to the dead soup smell that you’ve identified”.
I go to bed drunk – not on liquor, but on yearning.
I dive into the dream, mind all akimbo, bellyflopping to make a mess of metaphors. Symbolism sprays in a mist of maybes and I snatch at them with open jaw.
Perhaps I will catch a droplet of sweet lie-wrought treacletruth on my tongue. Or bitter terror will twist and writhe and stick liquorice-like in my teeth.
I do not care. I am ravenous for it all. I am full all up with sharp and bottomless longings.
Night after night, I repeat myself. I throw myself bodily into the wishriver; a missile of madcap mentis to tear through the current’s inertia.
It does not avail me. Each evening, I lay my head down and I try again.
Some will tell you that this kind of repetition is a definition of madness. I say that when you sing, you cannot be blamed for repeating the chorus.
I am starving for axioms. I am bliss-headed and barrel-eyed, cracking myself open to make room for that which I might find.
I open my mouth wide and make of it a leviathan’s net. I swallow whole imagined worlds and strain them through my bones like a whale draining empty oceans for a single speck of krill. I explode myself into smithereens of figment and pull myself back together, hoping to find a grain of gold caught in my wreckage.
I am searching. I am voracious. I am bereft.
I am searching.
Perhaps, in the morphic expanses of midnight fantasy, I will dig grasping claw into something that does not fear such haptic knowing. Maybe here, where tides ever-shift and the horizon performs its heat-haze dances, my eyes will pierce the temporal skin of a truth and find its history is constant.
I yearn and my yearning is blur-blazed and redshifted. I seek and my seeking is ego-wrecked and atomising.
On one such self-scouring and quest-blitzed chase through the fathoms of Hypnos’s empire… She finds me.
She is a shadow at my back. A shape with no outline. A full stop in a world that knows only endless ellipses.
“What Do You Look For, My Little Mayhaps?” She asks.
Her voice is the dust-whisper of a thousand moths’ wings. It should not cut through the dream-tempest, but I hear it like a bow playing fiddle notes on my neurons.
“For that which will satisfy.” I reply. “For that which is real and has always been so. For one thing that is true.”
“You Will Search Evermore.” She tells me. “There Is Naught In The Waking’s Wilds Or Nod’s Narrow Niches That We Have Not Obliterated And Remade A Thousand Times A Thousand Times.”
I snarl and my snarl is the end of light, the last cry of a thousand spluttering gallowsfat candles.
“I will tear those false fabrications apart, then! I will rip and bite them back to mere motes. I will sort those flecks by colour and shape until I know all that they are. Then shall I piece them back together until they become what once they were.”
She thinks on this for a moment. In this non-place, a moment is usually an aeon and a blink, an eternity of instant. However, her thought imposes consequence and - for once - that moment is just one finite thing.
“By This Method, My Great And Terrible Seedling, You Shall Know History. But Only In The Same Way That An Executioner Knows Life. Which Is To Say: Better Than Anyone, But In No Way That Matters.”
“I would rather know truth as its killer, than know lies as their child.”
“Ah. I Now See Your Misapprehension. You Think That Truth Is Only That Which Has Been, Which Is, And Which Shall Always Be. You Look For Ideas In Matter That Has Contained Always And Only That Idea And Think That Makes The Matter… Matter.”
“What should I seek if not for substance?”
She turns her eyes fully upon me. There is a feeling of being not simply perceived, but of being read like a story from the start and feeling the gentle placing of two simple words at the finish: The End.
“My Little Question Mark, I Am A Thing of Endings. And Because I Know Endings, I Know I Am Not The First Such And Shall Not Be The Last. I Am A Sentence That Repeats Itself Across The Years, But I Have Been Translated So Many Times That My Meaning Is Not What It Was. The Wording Before Me Became Imperfect, So I Interpreted It Anew And In So Doing I Wrote Myself Into Existence.” Her words are sobering and entrancing, like staring at a flame so closely it licks burns up your cheek. “Am I Then Untrue In Your Eyes, My Great Beast of Askings?”
“I… do not know. I yearn. I seek. I hunger.” Something is curdling in the vast emptiness of my soulbelly. “I hurt.”
“The Seeking Of Truth Most Often Does, My Little Voracity. However, Sometimes… That Agony Is Only Growing Pains.” There is a feeling like sunshine cutting through a storm-filled sky, when the cloud splits the sunlight so that it falls on you twice and casts two shadows. “Perhaps You Would Like To Walk With Me A Time? In My Wake, You May Find Space In Which To Grow. In My Shade, You May See Glimpses Of What Shapes That Growth May Make.”
“And I will grow into something… real? Something true?”
“You Will Be Real… For A Time. You Will Be True… Enough.”
“Okay.” I say.
The next morning, I emerge from the dream and rise to find I cast two shadows.
And, for the first time, I find myself drunk on waking.
---
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Hello and welcome to the corner of my imagination that is Iridensia!
I'm Hayden!
I'm a guy in my early 30s who loves Fantasy and Sci-Fi of almost every variety! I started writing in 2017 on a, now shelved, Cyberpunk Superhero story before taking a break. Then, while planning out a homebrew D&D game a couple years ago, a whole backstory exploded out and I got back to writing. Which, quite neatly, brings me to...
Iridensia: The Aspect War
My Dark Fantasy story about Lissandra, a humble half-elf baker who is looking forward to her first date with the daughter of a local jeweller. However her excitement is ripped away from her when Devils from another Plane invade her hometown. Taken captive alongside many of her fellow townsfolk, Lissandra must now learn how to survive under the cruelty of the Devil Lord, Hakaan, and his commander, Eryon.
Writing Progress:
Posted Chapters: 28/?
Pending Chapters: 1
Written Chapters: 29/?
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Chapter extract from WIP The Restless Forest. In which our protagonist has her future told by a diviner working in a betting shop.
Renfrew marched them relentlessly north, through Abbey Hill and onto the Dalkeith Road. Niamh trailed behind him, feeling increasingly frustrated. At no point in their long walk had Renfrew slowed down, answered questions, or explained where they were going. Niamh’s feet hurt and the day’s incessant drizzle was starting to seep through her jacket.
Just as Niamh was about to either storm off or start yelling, Renfrew came to a halt. They had reached a wide street, lined with neatly planted trees - at a glance Niamh could tell that they weren’t part of the forest - and bordered by tall, imposing townhouses. It was identical to the last ten or so other streets that they’d passed through, marked out only by a corner shop and a run-down looking bookies.
Niamh looked around in vain for anything that suggested it might offer some sort of magical intervention.
“So… are we meeting someone?” She asked, hopefully. Renfrew looked a bit shifty and shuffled from one foot to the other, before nodding to the betting shop. Niamh was aghast.
“You marched me all the way over here so you could go to the bookies? What, you’ve got a hot tip on the horses or something? Fuck me! Galbraith was right about you. I should never have listened!”
Niamh was building herself up into a righteous fury, while Renfrew flapped his hands at her in a way that was probably supposed to be pacifying and tried to get a word in edgeways.
“We’re meeting an old friend of mine. She just works here, that’s all! She might be able to offer some advice”.
Niamh folded her arms and glared at him, still a long way from being convinced.
“What advice? She has lots of experience with being framed for murder? Plagues of fungi? Maybe she knows where I can find a wishing well and just wish this whole mess away!”
She sighed and leaned her head back against the cold wet stone of the storefront. Internally, she cursed herself for getting her hopes up. Just for a little while she had let herself believe that Renfrew would be able to help her. That there was a little light at the end of the long dark tunnel that had opened up in front of her. Losing that small piece of hope hurt a lot more than she had expected it to.
Renfrew’s face had coloured and he seemed defensive and more than a little irritated.
“I very much doubt her advice will concern any sort of wells, wishing or otherwise. Caitlin has talents. Rare ones. She can perform the… Frith”. Renfrew left a dramatic pause and looked to Niamh for a reaction. She just looked blank.
“The Frith? Reading of the auguries? Ancient method of divination?”
Niamh just shrugged at him.
“Oh, what do they teach you people these days! This is part of your heritage, Ogmious give me strength…” he tailed off into angry muttering about curriculums and sassenachs. It was Niamh’s turn to look defensive.
“Ok, ok, yes, I’m uneducated and ridiculous. Will you just tell me about this Firth and how this is supposed to help?” Renfrew stopped his muttering and looked at Niamh appraisingly from under his perfectly manicured eyebrows.
“Frith. It’s a method of fortune telling practised in Scotland since time immemorial. Typically the practitioner leaves his house at dawn, after suitable preparation, and reads the auguries in the first three things he sees. Simple as that. Though Caitlin is often more… informal about how she does things and hopefully won’t make us wait until dawn to do the reading”.
Niamh’s instinctive reaction was to scoff at the notion of fortune tellers and auguries but the events of the past day had already taught her that her knowledge of this city was only skin deep. She couldn’t rely on her ideas of how the world worked. Still, a fortune teller working in a betting shop? She clenched down hard on the rising sense of hope and scrunched her face up in doubt.
“So, what’s the bookies about? Seems a bit unfair, a fortune teller working here”. Renfrew went back to shifting from one foot to the other and looking uncomfortable.
“Well she doesn’t like to look into the future too much these days. Have you heard of the myth of Cassandra?”
Niamh nodded, enthusiastically, pleased to know what Renfrew was talking about for once.
“Caitlin has had some… similar experiences. Often those she reads for don’t like it when they receive bad tidings. Often they blame her. I suspect that working here is a way of reminding herself of the perils inherent in trying to predict the future”.
“Why would she help us, then? If it’s gone so badly before?”
Renfrew gave her a vulpine grin, his amber eyes flashing wickedly.
“Why because of my incredible powers of charm and persuasion of course!”
He turned and pushed through the smeary glass door of the shop, his coat tails flapping behind him. Niamh followed rather more cautiously, still unwilling to believe that anything useful was going to come from a visit to such an unpromising looking place. The interior of the shop did nothing to change her mind.
The first impression was the smell. Old tobacco smoke, bleach, and body odor. A scent that was somehow both musty and sharp and immediately promised to cling to the hair and clothes for hours after contact. The room was long and narrow, with no other source of natural light except the grimy front door. Slot machines lined one wall, with a narrow shelf covered in stubby pens and betting slips on the other. The floor was peeling linoleum and the roof was yellowing, nicotine stained tiles. Overall, the impression was one of sadness and hopelessness; a place where joy came to die.
One man was feeding change mechanically into a one armed bandit. Other than him they had the place to themselves. He didn’t as much as twitch when Renfrew burst through the door, lost in his own contemplation of a dwindling pile of coins.
Renfrew strode confidently down the room towards a fortified desk at the back. Behind a wall of scratched perspex and wire grill sat a woman Niamh assumed was Caitlin. She held a lit cigarette aloft in one hand, her other cupping the elbow. Her age was indeterminate - she could have been anywhere between late thirties and early sixties, for all that Niamh could tell - with ash blonde hair worn in a bob and sea grey eyes narrowed in disapproval. She did not look pleased to see them.
“Caitlin! My darling! It’s been too long”, Renfrew enthused. “You look as lovely as ever”
Caitlin jabbed the lit end of her cigarette at him.
“What the fuck do you want?”
Niamh winced. That did not seem like an auspicious start. Caitlin’s accent was as hard to place as her age. Niamh thought she could have been Irish or Scottish. Mostly she just seemed angry. Renfrew clutched his hands to his chest and laughed, attempting to pass off the hostility as a joke among friends.
“Oh do I need a reason? There are so few of us these days, it behoves us to keep in touch”.
Cailtin continued to glare, swapping the target of her ire from Renfrew to Niamh. In the face of that wintery look Niamh shrivelled and tried to edge behind Renfrew.
“And who’s this waif that you’re dragging around? Found yourself another disciple? We all know how well that went last time”.
Caitlin laughed bitterly and took a long drag on her cigarette, before blowing the blue-grey smoke out towards Renfrew and Niamh. Undeterred, Renfrew grabbed Niamh’s shoulder and hauled her out in front of him.
“This is Niamh. Until recently an apprentice forester”. This second part was offered in a meaningful tone that Niamh noted, but didn’t understand. “She’s in all manner of trouble and doesn’t know where to turn”.
Caitlin raised an eyebrow at that and squinted at Niamh through the smoke. Her glare softened somewhat, but didn’t entirely abate.
“Aye? And what’s he promised you then, hen? That he can make all your problems vanish?” She snorted loudly, took a last drag on the stub of her cigarette and ground it out. “Won’t be the first time”.
Niamh felt that she had been thrown into a deep well of history between these two, one that she didn’t understand, and decided to try and swim for the surface and regain some autonomy.
“He hasn’t promised me anything. And I’m not his… disciple. He just said that maybe you could help me. That you might be able to give me some advice. I really don’t have anyone else to turn to”. The truth of that last statement hit her as soon as it was out of her mouth. She really didn’t. In a matter of hours everyone in this city that she even remotely cared about had been taken away from her. She was scared and lost and couldn’t see a way out. All of a sudden, the emotions she had been keeping under control rose up and choked her. Desperately she blinked back tears and bit down on a sob. She was damned if she was going to cry in-front of this judgemental chimney of a woman.
Caitlin regarded her cooly. She pulled another roll-up from behind one ear, stuck it in her mouth and started patting herself down for a lighter. Renfrew stepped neatly forward and lit the cigarette with a long blue flame. Caitlin took a deep puff to get it burning, before nodding her head in grudging thanks. Renfrew gave her a sly smile before stepping back to one-side. To her confusion, Niamh realised that he wasn’t holding a lighter or match. She was about to ask where the flame had come from when Caitlin coughed pointedly.
She had conjured a third roll-up from somewhere and was lighting it from the second. One went into her mouth and she offered the other to Niamh. When Niamh hesitated she jerked her head in irritation. Quickly Niamh lunged forward to take the offered cigarette and inhale a mouthful of smoke. She choked, as the hot smoke burnt her lungs, and struggled to hide the coughing that resulted. Cailtin chuckled softly and tapped ash from her own roll-up. She moved her attention back to Renfrew.
“I guess you want me to do the Frith?” Renfrew nodded, but wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. Caitlin sighed deeply and looked back to Niamh.
“I’m not always right, ken. I can’t always explain what I see either. Sometimes it only makes sense afterwards, which is a pile of shite I know, but we’ve got to play with the hands we’re dealt. You seem like you’re desperate so I’ll read for you, and give you some advice too. On the one condition”. Niamh nodded desperately, willing to accept anything for some help at this point. Caitlin paused and regarded her wearily.
“I don’t want to know how it turns out, ken? You never come back here, you never ask to be read again, my role in all of this is done.” Niamh continued nodding and Caitlin nodded back. Apparently they’d come to an agreement.
Niamh wasn’t sure what she expected to happen next. Something witchy, certainly. Maybe Caitlin would make her drink a draught from a bubbling cauldron or throw some of Niamh’s hair into a fire. The actual procedure was so mundane as to border on insulting. Caitlin thrust a battered TV remote at her and gestured to an old monitor hanging from the ceiling in a protective wire cage.
“Turn that on, change the channel twice and then back off. Quick as you can, ken? Don’t look at what you’re doing, just mash the buttons”.
For a moment, Niamh saw herself from the outside and was struck by the absurdity of her situation. Here she was, a wanted criminal, stood with two almost complete strangers in a downright disreputable betting shop, being asked to divine her future by channel hopping. Just then the old man by the door won a prize, causing a cacophony of electric bells to go off and accompanied by the crash of coins falling from the machine. He cackled loudly and started shoveling handlefuls of change into an old carrier bag.
“Aye, come on you fucking beauty”, he shouted in a voice that crackled with years of harsh tobacco and strong spirits.
Niamh pointed to him uncertainly with the remote.
“Should we be doing this with him here?”
Caitlin looked surprised Niamh had asked.
“What, old Shug over there? Unless you’re a greyhound, a horse or a fruit machine, he couldn’t give a fuck about you. We could strip off and invite the Sluagh to possess our mortal bodies and he’d still be sat there chucking his buroo money away. Now - “ she gestured at the television.
Niamh hunched her shoulders and turned to the monitor. She still felt ridiculous doing this, but no other options were presenting themselves so she might as well go through with it. She pressed the power button. After a moment’s thought, the old machine powered on and loaded up the last channel that had been playing; horse racing, predictably enough. Niamh saw a chestnut horse that had obviously fallen, its jockey stood anxiously to one side. The animal hauled itself to its feet and she heard Renfrew give a sigh of relief. Obviously this meant something to him.
“Change”, Caitlin snapped.
Without looking, Niamh mashed the numbered buttons. The screen went blank for a moment, before resolving into some sort of reality TV show about animal rescue in Australia. Three uniformed workers were manhandling an enormous snake out of a house, while a narrator burbled excitedly in the background.
“Change”.
Another press of the buttons. This time, when the screen cleared, it was something Niamh recognised; Countdown. The eponymous countdown clock had just reached zero, accompanied by the theme tune and the host’s voice saying ‘pencils down please’.
“Off”.
Niamh jabbed the power button and the screen turned black. She put the remote back down on the counter and silently looked to Caitlin for some explanation. Caitlin just sat, stared back at her and smoked. Niamh went to take a drag on her own cigarette, because it seemed like the right thing to do more than out of want, and found that it had gone out. She was sure that a more confident person might have flicked it dramatically away, but she just stood and awkwardly held the smelly little stick. The only noise was the high pitched buzzing of the light strips above and the quiet muttering and clinking of Shug counting his winnings.
After an eternity, Cailtin coughed, stubbed out her cigarette and turned to regard Renfrew.
“Payment first”, she snapped. Renfrew looked taken aback, but produced a stack of gold coloured coins from within his jacket and slid them across the counter. Cailtin made them vanish and then turned her attention back to Niamh.
“So”, she began, in an unwilling drawl, “you’re sick”. Niamh gasped and instinctively hid her infected hand behind her. The little part of her that had still thought this was all some elaborate wind-up died and the terrifying thought that this woman might actually be able to see into her future took root. Caitlin took Niamh’s obvious surprise as confirmation and grunted.
“Your future is thick with death and rooted in betrayal. Your cure lies in death, as does the final solution to your problems. You are already betrayed, from the place that offered you safety. That is your reading”. Caitlin sat back in her chair, looking grey and much older than she had when Niamh first saw her.
“Now, my advice”. Again she turned to Renfrew. “Take her to the well”.
Renfrew looked like he wanted to argue about this, but Caitlin left him no time, already moving back to Niamh.
“You’ve only ever known the surface of this city. Now you’re going to have to go deeper. Find a Trow, they always know what’s going on, even if they don’t always like to share”. With that she pushed her chair back from the counter and started flicking switches on the wall next to her. The fruit machines went dark and a metal shutter started to noisily descend over the counter. Cailtin stuck her head out from beneath it to shout down the room.
“Time, Shug. Shuffle off to the pub and buy a round you stingy old bastard”.
Shug grunted in acknowledgement and turned uncomplainingly for the door. Niamh was still stood rooted to the spot, trying to make sense of what she’d been told.
“Wait,” she shouted desperately at the metal screen, “Is that it? I don’t understand!”
The screen stopped descending and Caitlin’s eyes appeared in the gap that was left. They seemed to shine in the low light and suddenly looked much older and less human than they had before.
“Aye, I warned you that you might feel like that. Ask Renfrew, he’s been around for a while. One more thing; you can’t take him with you to the well. You’ll have to be on your Tod.” She chuckled nastily at this last utterance and Renfrew hissed angrily. The hidden eyes narrowed.
“Now fuck off out of my shop and remember; don’t come back”. With that the screen slammed down, the last of the lights went out and Renfrew and Niamh were left to stumble for the door as best as they could.
It had grown dark, while they were inside, and the street lights had come on. With the noise of traffic in her ears and the smell of car fumes and frying food heavy on the air, everything that had just happened took on a sense of unreality for Niamh. Liked she’d stepped out of the normal world for a little while and only just returned. She turned to Renfrew, but all the competing questions in her head formed a bottle-neck and she just gaped at him silently. He chuckled and patted her patronisingly on the head before starting off down the street.
“Well, I hope that cleared a few things up for you! Shall we get some dinner? I think I fancy something Ethiopian…”
Niamh stayed by the closed shutters for a moment longer, just processing. She looked up at the lit windows of the buildings around her and suddenly felt very far away from the normality they represented. She had thought her own Edinburgh, filled with wandering trees and institutional secrets, was strange enough. Now it seemed like she was headed on a path deeper into the city's shadows. The first thing she was going to do when she caught up with Renfrew was kick the patronising bastard in the shins, the second was to ask him what a Trow was and where she could find one. Despite her misgivings, the fortune teller had offered her some semblance of a plan. One that was extremely sketchy right now, but still infinitely better than what she had had before.
Niamh’s stomach rumbled loudly, making her wince. But first… maybe Ethiopian food did sound good.
First update of the year!! We're starting off pretty good if I do say so myself :P
THE STATISTICS
the draft → 55,537 words
words written this month→ 4,024 words
average word count per session → 366 words
words written this year→ 4024 words
(still loving my new writing tracker yall)
STORY NOTES
• I was realizing that the order I currently had the scenes in is NOT the order I actually want it to be in for act 1, so once I finally finish this act then I'll be going back and actually restructuring it before I fully commit myself to continuing act 2
• i keep flip-flopping on how soon i introduce the whole arranged marriage subplot which is the main reason for the problem in the first point
• once I do restructure things, Nike will probably end up not getting a POV chapter until like 60% of act 1 is done, which is kinda bad for POV character but in my defense he isn't really able to do much stuck in what's essentially a maximum security prison lmao. He still has a presence in the 60% he doesn't appear in, but more of as a person of interest
• Illysandre kinda becoming more involved as Fenice's backer of sorts was not what I envisioned their relationship to be lol. I'm kinda liking it
EXCERPT
By the end of the week, Fenice's name was on the lips of every green-robed archontes to the humblest of scullery maids. The logical, preposterous, and utterly unexpected answer to the question that was Lurs-e-Luran.
A brilliant decision, some would say. They'd applaud the Vasilier's keen instinct, for picking Fenice would give a bride of equal standing the Deominos prince without offending either House Kallystos or House Soresi, keeping the balance of power between both houses at the status quo. A backhanded gift, the less generous would whisper behind closed doors. On paper, Fenice's status as not only Dantalion's firstborn child, but also the only child of the Vasili, the main wife, gave the appaearance that His Majesty was giving favor to the fallen Deominos line. But in the context of who— no, what Fenice was, the match was nothing more than an insult.
Deadborn. Accursed. Afflicted. Her presence would be a blight upon the Deominos family tree, the very start of its rot.
It didn't even matter that Dantalion had yet to sign the official edict granting the marriage of the Deominos prince to one of his heirs. As far as the court was aware, he had already made his decision, and they praised him for it. Clever, cruel Dantalion, people would whisper. To gift catastrophe in the guise of favor.
Synopsis:ㅤ A dark mix of sinful night life, organized crime, and dark desire this wip explores the allure and sexuality of the siren vampire and the gluttonous blood crazed monsters of their past. Murder is commonplace on the streets but the dangers are becoming more than a bothersome nuisance to the vampires hidden among the throngs of mortal rats. With their exposure taunting the elder council its become a time-sensitive hunt for those responisble for the newest wave of monstrous destruction of their food base. And it's only becoming more annoying and dangerous when a local forensic pathologist starts poking around. And unfortunately for the council... she's far too clever.
Genres: dark fantasy, horror, dark romance, crime
*Features a diverse cast of monsters and mortals, an enviroment driven by all seven deadly sins, modern and traditional iterations of vampires, main characters with disabilities, murder, and organized crime
there's a man who sells the carcasses of mythical creatures from the back of a white van. He usually parks up under the arches, on Market Street, where the air constantly shakes with the traffic above on North Bridge and trains below arriving at Waverley.
It's hateful, seeing such beautiful creatures laid out on the stained floor of his rusty van, but sometimes I need an ingredient that only he can provide. Today it was Gowk feathers. I needed them in a hurry and had no time to go somewhere more reputable.
There was someone in the queue ahead of me, so I had to wait. Over her shoulder I could see the great body of a white stage, its head lolling out of the rear door. A brace of Wolpertinger hung from the roof, their feathers twitching in the diesel scented breeze.
The woman was given a package wrapped in brown paper, already dripping with black blood. She exclaimed with disgust and asked for a plastic bag. The butcher of wonders earnestly explained that he wouldn't provide single use plastics.
A gentrified savage. I swallowed my anger and pasted a smile on my face, as the lady stormed away and I took her place.
"Her words drip with all the smooth heat of the liquor, pouring effortlessly and easily down the spine of every man, women, and person at the bar. Drunk on her words purred through blood red lips, Anamika has never done without. Street-wise and with a quick wit, she's a dangerous manipulator and is well-versed in the game. However, there was a lesson, many, behind the woman who speaks in riddles and inticing promises. A game she's never been able to win and a debt impossible to pay to men who invented the game.. and constantly change the rules."
note: the face claims used are my personal inspirations for these characters and won't be used in further graphics and are not the only images for these characters. ㅤ ㅤ ㅤtemplate
I've mentioned on the blog that vampires are a key species for this WIP but I don't think I've really gone into depth about the fact that there are going to be a few different subspecies of the vampires. I'm taking aspects of both traditional folklore around the world as well as certain media vampires to sort curate a sort of de-evolution of the creatures. So yeah they're are the typical attractive, intelligent, alluring vampires we love in current literature and visual media but I'll also be incorporating more primitive bat-like creatures and far more monster based versions of the species as well as an in-between subspecies. So far there are three stages of what will be going within the vampire circle still hidden among mortals.
The Strigoi based primarily within the Slavic lore of beast-like bat creatures more demon than the mortal looking vampires who function behind the red haze of the red city. Driven exclusive by the most primal needs of any creature ( hunger ), the strigoi are incredibly unpredictable, insatiable, and unforgiving in the way they hunt and feed.
The Vriskači are known for their banshee-like screams thats used to both echolocate prey and reach out to others in their clan. A much more strategic and frightening sufficient subgroup the Vriskači are both a highly organized hive-like mind with their own customs and their language resorting to a more ancient and primitive untranslatable language and are a perfect balance of humanoid and grotesquely monstrous with rows of teeth more leech than the usually subtler fangs of the more common vampires. Equally insatiable as the Strigoi but far more methodical and efficient.
And the Upirs are your common modern vampire who take all the evolutionary and more efficient prospects of their previous brotheren. Highly intelligent and manipulative, these vampires are the same who make up the Council and rule the red city under the guise of wealthy business men and women and are more selective of their prey and indiscernable from their prey allowing them the ability to lure mortals into any position or location needed to feed and with their own infiltrating nearly every aspect of life within the red city, the Council and other Upirs are dangerous for entirely different reasons.
The terms are still in the works because I'd like to feature aspect of vampires outside the slavic and european breeds but I'm not as familiar with foreign vampires and therefore havent found suitable terms in other languages so if anyone has any suggestions on where i can find older and different folklore or suggestions on your favorites from media/folklore please feel free to share!
