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From ‘The Forager's Calendar: A Seasonal Guide to Nature’s Wild Harvests’ by John Wright

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it’s always “don’t be afraid to be yourself!” and “you’re perfect just the way you are!” until you drive ONE bitch to madness by revealing your true eldritch form and then suddenly it’s all “put those extra limbs away!” and “nobody should have that many eyes!” and “it hurts to even look at you!” i’m so sick of these double standards

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““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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Aliens vs. Predator by Dave Dorman

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“It appears that I’ve been impaled but that’s okay. You should see the other guy.”

frank is not interested in sacrifices, now. he tries to focus on the present, when there is no present; time dissolves into a spiraling free-fall, a collection of noises that ache inside his skull.

the entity hungers. it always does. it is screaming angrily into the fog, as he drives his knife into body after body after body. kills them with his hands, with his own bloodlust: an echo of his ancestors, bright and burning like a fever, like a vengeful plague.

yes, it hungers. but frank, in contrast, feels vindicated. hot, steaming blood on his mask, dripping over the molded surface like tears. dripping on his jeans. his sneakers. his hands. the snow underneath him.

it feels like food. like his skin is eating the plasma, as it soaks through his clothes. nourished by it, like a cub to its mother's teat. frank feels simultaneously naked, and powerful. free.

@mrgoatman is the last survivor that still breathes.

for this, frank removes his mask. the last one alive. the last supper.

"yeah?" he looms over finnian's injured body. maskless, mask discarded, his eyes catch the light of the moon; it makes him look different, luminous, blood reflecting the moonlight like liquid obsidian. red turning to black.

frank decides to play with the food.

"didn't he have a mask?"

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claudette, for a moment, only watches him. if she is surprised by his honesty, the feeling is muted by an odd sense of understanding. if she had had no excuse to be here, surrounded by the quiet, peaceful life of the garden — she would have found one. she has.

from the roof, there is a perfect view of the quad. bodies moving across the curving stone sidewalks like the ants scattered across the underside of l. schreiber's table. she considers it a compliment; ants are much, much older than humanity. their synergy as a superorganism has allowed them to create complex systems and hierarchies that ultimately served their survival, their prosperity.

she admires people like she admires the insects in her entomology collection; delicately. privately. behind an invisible wall, like glass, that seemed to be a psychological barrier between herself, and normal people. sometimes, charlie acts as if he sees the glass wall, and walks right through it. knowing it is there, and deciding not to care. she admires that. envies that.

calmed, claudette moves towards the bench. she sits next to him, creating enough space between them to give him room to move, if he wanted to.

"then i'll wait with you... if that's okay?"

DID YOU NEED SOMETHING? he considers the question. spends an awfully long time saying nothing at all. ( did you need something? ) not really. he saw a bug; the bug reminded him of claudette; he brought claudette the bug as a matter of association. simple cause and effect. ( or is it pretense? a meticulously justified excuse to step foot into a garden he has no reason to be in. ) ’ no, ’ comes the eventual response: a thoroughly-pondered monosyllable. he didn’t need something. he set out to do a task and he’s done it; he wanted to see claudette and killed a bug to do it. predators are opportunists.

’ i’m going to wait for the spider, ’    he decides, out loud, in a voice that isn’t very loud at all.

hunting takes energy; a free meal doesn’t. charlie sits on the bench of the picnic table. there’s a plaque on the far end—a sheet-metal dedication to someone named L. SCHREIBER. the table is old, and he wonders if they’re dead by now. ( probably not. ) he looks at his palms the way he’s seen claudette look at hers. studies the lines he finds there, and the way they seem to sprout from the fraying cuffs of his sweater.

he looks uncomfortably out of place in the garden. an invasive species: some desert animal that has no business being surrounded by fanning leaves and rolling humidity. but he looks resolved, too. ( he is going to wait for the spider. )    ’ you can stay. if you want. ’    he slides to one side of the bench. dedicates the space to claudette in much the same way as the plaque dedicates the table to l. schreiber. ’ i guess it’ll take a while, though. ’

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Alien vs. Predator (2004) directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

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[Block from leaving.] *b/c he wants answers.*

all manners of maladies occur in the hoover valley shantytown of chicago.

claudette seems to gravitate towards the pain, and relieving it. free it from the body. she thinks that she can feel it, the entity, like a heavy blanket of suffering weighted over the population. feeding. searching.

her clinic could only afford space in an abandoned warehouse, set up in secret and filled with jars of herbs and balms and powders and sterilizing moonshine, collected with the help from hooverville's humbled community.

perceived as a black woman, and jim crow looming over her head, claudette knows it is easier to hide from this world's historical prejudices; keeping her head low, making herself seem small.

but all her secrecy and humility is tested when two men stumble into the makeshift operating room. @howlinsmoke's tweed suit stained with stack's blood and sweat. no hospitals, he demands more than asks. just fix 'im up. as a pistol hangs on his fingers, restless, impatient.

she boils willow bark in hot water and makes tea with it; remembers that the active ingredient in the bark and roots is salicin, a chemical that, in 1897, formed the basis of the discovery of aspirin, one of the most commonly used drugs in the world.

and centuries before aspirin was just a thought in a white man's mind, native mothers had used willow bark for their children's fevers and aches.

stack's fever is reduced, after she helps him drink a concoction of willow bark and herbal analgesics. he would be too tired to feel the stitches, the steady, meticulous movements of her fingers gliding across sliced skin. too nimble, too experienced.

"no signs of internal bleeding. he'll be okay. but i would still recommend a hospital."

she gathers the towels and tools that she had used to help them. intended to leave the brothers to their privacy.

but smoke stops her. stands between her and the mesh curtain as if he were a sentinel. a guard dog. his brother's keeper.

how you know all this? she thinks he asks, but she is not entirely certain. the steady, pervasive fear that she conceals like a tightly wrapped box seems to be unraveling. reality shrinks into nothingness, into a singular point, into a moment. she is hyper-focused on his attention, his suspicion. and the urge to compromise.

"i've… spent some time w-with local chitimacha tribes in louisiana. before i moved out here, for w-work. um. they would use the bark t-to relieve pain, a-and stop fevers. it's been that way for a long time, for them."

when she lies, her heart feels tighter, shakier. claudette turns her face away from him, hugs the towels closer to her chest.

"...does it matter?"

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“I can’t look. How bad is it? No wait, don’t tell me.”

the raven kneels in front of @aliasinvestigate, lets her palm hover over the woman's wound; a dark, purpling bruise blooming across jessica's shoulder blade.

she assesses the damage, letting her umbrakinesis gently thread through the skin, the muscle fibers. a painless transference of convalescent energy.

"you did just go toe-to-toe with solomon grundy. and lived," she says, her husky, monotonous voice concealing the relatively lighthearted expression in her eyes. "i've transferred most of the source of your physical pain into myself. you're going to feel a little sore, but otherwise, nothing is broken." the raven moves, nimbly rising to her feet. she offers jessica her arm, to help her stand. treats her with a strange familiarity, as if they had already met. because it often feels that way, to the raven, a foreigner to the temporal and spatial constrictions of reality.

"lets get you something to drink, hm?"

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Stephen Marley - Chase Dem

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continued from @dayzarisn (x)

she hates magic. she does not trust what she can not physically chase, can not hold. but a job is a job. a cursed amulet is still an amulet; a family heirloom with a destructive undying spell; by itself it is worth at least one million USD.

arms folded tightly across her chest, a clawed finger taps against her bicep, as she slides her eyes over the dark, towering shape that makes up this man. like dusk in the daylight. streetlights spilling over his leather coat like a shadow's halo.

feel free to claw out my tongue if you find out i sold your ass a wolf ticket, is what he says.

"promises, promises," she chides him; her voice is a low, patronizing orotund, to match the wry smile curling her lips.

the catwoman's client was a self-proclaimed occultist for the court of owls. important enough to afford her services, with an additional finder's fee. and she could find anything, steal anything. with the appropriate incentive. if she wanted to.

"world of men. world of monsters. same difference," she opts for an emotive camouflage; humor that resonates, humor that bites. rolling her eyes to the sky; shrugging her shoulders as she unfolded her arms, a hand curving over her hip. dismissive, she brings her clawed fingers up and parallel to her face, observing the sharp points of her lacquered nails.

"just don't get in my way, honey. you're here to kill them. i'm here to pay my bills."

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SHŌGUN (2024)

Chapter 9: Crimson Sky