#folk horror fic

[bad-surprise]

sweet as honey, ever on his tongue

haladriel x midsommar | E | graphic violence, major character death | 1/?

“We have a festival for the summer solstice,” Hal explains. “It’s the climax of our year. And death plays a significant role in it— not in a macabre, somber way, but more of— our community utilize… unique methods to process grief. We believe it’s wrong to force an individual to shoulder that weight alone.”

For the first time in months, Galadriel gains the acute awareness— and accompanying rush of soft affection— that she’s been seen. Invisible as her staggering loss has made her feel— and despite all the endless nights in which she wished she might disappear completely— there’s comfort in this.

It almost tastes like hope.

- - -

“We’re not going to Numenor to get laid,” Elrond explains, ignoring Thranduil’s death glare, “we’re going because— well, I’m going for my thesis. You two just invited yourselves along.”

or: the Midsommar AU.

[starry-bi-sky]

more cfau miscellaneous things because Childhood Friends Danny and Jason have my head and heart always and I need to finish rewriting chapter two dammit (and redo the half-finished chapter 4 because its just Not The Vibes). i'm almost through I need to get through the graveyard scene. (i just stubbornly refuse to have it be shorter than the original chapter and thats the little death. that is the mind killer.)

Danny and jason’s ghost forms both smell faintly like burnt flesh and cigarettes. However, Jason has a more smokey smell while Danny’s smells almost,,, electrical? In a sense? Like he just straight up smells like burnt flesh and sulphur while Jason smells like someone put him in a smoker first.

It’s very much an unpleasant smell but Danny finds an odd comfort in it just as much as he finds a comfort in the smell of nicotine.

(Jason post-revival smells burnt flesh once and is immediately offput by the fact that it brings him an instinctive comfort. He doesn’t realize its because it reminds him of Danny, and is uncomfortable by it.)

-

In an au of an au, Danny’s altercation with Rath ends with Rath regaining enough of his sanity to snap out of the grieving state and ends with him breaking down. Instead of being souped and imprisoned, Rath, who is permanently 14, decides to Move On into the unknown. He’s exhausted, heartbroken, and tired.

(Is this influenced heavily by the ParaNorman scene where he talks to Agatha and helps her move on? Yes. But it doesn’t fit with the Original Storyline so im shoving it into an Au of an Au.)

Rath tells Danny that Jason lied to them (which he genuinely believes), and that he’s tired of waiting/looking for him/grieving. Jason is gone. He isn’t coming back, he abandoned them. And he wants his mom and dad, and his sister, and his friends. And he’s ready to join them.

He leads Danny out to Gotham, which other than Amity Park might’ve been the only city left untouched due to Rath’s own mental block on the place. They go out to the park he and Jason used to frequent or up to one of crime alley’s rooftops, and there Rath lies down and goes to sleep. Only to never wake up again, materializing into nothing as his soul moves on.

Before Rath leaves, he forces Danny to promise him that he’ll only wait for Jason for ten years. After that if he doesn’t find him, or if Jason doesn’t show, then Danny has to move on. Whether that be like how Rath does, or if its inly mentally/emotionally, doesn’t matter. He has to move on. Don’t wait for him. Don’t waste his time any more.

(“Oh, and if you find him, kick his ass for me.”)

Danny reluctantly agrees, and Rath lies down. Danny sings to him as he falls asleep.

(Angsty points if the vigilantes including Red Hood caught wind of their presence and were silently watching from the shadows. Rath might know they’re there, but Danny’s too focused on Rath to notice.)

(If only so that Red Hood realizes that this is what happened to Danny, and that Danny is gone before he can make things right. The tragedy, folks. The angst. The initial realization that Danny was Rath, and then also that Danny was dead and has been dead for years, and that before he moved on, he moved on believing that Jason abandoned him.)

(like i said it doesn't fit in the original timeline/storyline hence why its an au of an au and isn't nearly a fleshed out, but i was largely just focusing on the tragedy of Rath moving on and Jason being alive to see it and realize just who Rath is.)

-

Just like how the Lazarus pits shot Jason's twiggy 4'6-5'4 (depending on what you find) feet tall and 86lb ass up like a tree an essentially fixed his malnutrition, the portal did the same thing for Danny.

(granted i forgot about malnutrition and danny's likely stunted growth at first -- his family lived in crime alley and despite both his parents working, I don't think they had enough food all the time. He probably wasn't as badly malnourished as Jason was, but he wasn't healthy either.)

Granted his ghost in its "natural" state (14) is short, and his growth spurts were slow at first, it did result in him reaching his dad's height. There were points where it just happened overnight, like a baby. He went to bed one night 5’6 and woke up the next day 5’10.

Jazz is shorter than him. Although I have't decided if she's even liminal at all (and if she is, it didn't cure everything because she would have also suffered childhood malnutrition, and since in au canon their parents didn't get their hands on physical ectoplasm until after they got to Amity Park. So the exposure is less.)

-

Danny's voice absolutely sounds like canon Dan's. It kinda just dropped one day when he was 16-17 and never went back up. Sam and Tucker sometimes ask him to just talk about anything because they find his voice soothing.

I'm not sure yet how Danny would feel about it at first considering Rath, but I imagine that Rath, when he did speak, would have had a quieter and scratchier/weaker voice considering he's spent the last decade shrieking and crying.

(and i suppose technically that shouldn't have any effect on his throat considering he's a ghost and idk if that would actually affect him, but i like the idea so im keeping it)

In the beginning you could hear him from a mile away by the sound of his loud, echoing wails, but ten years later you can only really hear him by the soft, shuddering sobs he makes. Like he's gasping for air that isn't there. The future is full of very quiet survivors.

And it's much easier to speak when you pitch your voice upwards (especially when whispering/speaking quietly) so he might've spoken in a higher, airy pitch in order to be heard. So Danny might actually find a comfort in having a lower voice.

[saladmix]

We have become a 200K word fic. Is this a feat, or a symptom of me simply not being able to shut up?

The world may never know.

Come join us for some miserable end of the world multiverse turtle fun! This chapter has been graciously beta read by @shyalia who is amazing thanks a billion.

[livingininsomnia]

“I’m always going to love you,” Silver says honestly. “A day or a year, however long I have.”

His eyes are gentle, soft as he takes your hand and presses it to his cheek, and your heart skips a beat.

“I don’t know how to stop.”

Thump.

Your breath catches in your throat, and warmth lights up your face, toes curling.

Just love me back, he doesn’t say.

[gellavonhamster]

What do I do with the rush that comes from writing two fics in such a short (for me) period. Do I continue The Musketeers WIP from the last year, or do I translate my old Turn fics into English? The latter is much more doable because they're short and that WIP fic is supposed to be long (it's already twice as long as most fics I've written, and that's only the first chapter and a half), but them not being translated doesn't weigh on my mind the way that WIP being unfinished does

[liathgray]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/45064147/chapters/123735166

Future Donnie makes a connection. This is not a good thing. Present Donnie… also makes a connection. Also not a good thing.

[syciaralynx]

Elysium my beloved (derogatory), Elysium my little bastard child (affectionate), you are being a lot, you are being too much, put your teeth away you antagonistic little shit.

[cochineal-leviat]

I finally finished this fic! I'm so happy! This was one of my favourite projects to work on. Even if it took a while, I loved writing the setting, the world and the characters.

To be short, this is a medieval fic where Kirby, a traveller seeking adventure, stumbles upon a mansion in the woods. They enter a world of wonder and mystery and meet a handsome Marquis who seems out of this world. Together they make merry in this strange world. Kirby's worries fade away as do their inhibitions.

Please enjoy!

I know it is weird to post the finale when I have never posted the first chapters (but I didn't have a Tumblr back then), so here is the first chapter for any new readers.

[seedlessmuffins]

.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

😌🌸 Well I might just disappear for another week after tonight but time to go through EVERYONE'S BLOGS and kiss all your little posts that I missed don't mind meeeee

[saintsenara]

the snow child merope gaunt/tom riddle sr. teen | 3k words

the potion merope gives him is not instantaneous. she does not want mad, burning passion, which is over in moments. she wants a lifetime of devotion. after all, she believes herself to be in love with him.

once upon a time, there was a girl who wished for a child with hair as black as a raven's wing, and skin as white as snow, and eyes as red as blood.

author's notes under the cut

this piece - the first work in cautionary tales for young witches, a collection of harry potter-themed folk- and fairy-tale retellings - was written during an unseasonably cold snap, which is the best sort of weather for telling horror stories.

its inspiration - and the source of its title - is angela carter’s own the snow child, from her short-story collection the bloody chamber. carter’s version of the tale has lent its central, ominous colour-scheme to this story - the black of a raven’s wing, the white of snow, and the red of blood.

it has also lent its theme of jealousy. our heroine here is cecilia - tom riddle sr.’s girlfriend - who is one of those incidental characters (she says a grand total of two things in half-blood prince) that i’m inexplicably obsessed with. i just can’t help but wonder what she, like the elder riddles and the rest of tom’s friends, thought when he disappeared with merope and wasn’t heard from for months.

i also think she makes - with her conventional attractiveness and upper-class background - an excellent rival to merope, whose physical and social distance from tom (even before magic is brought into the equation) is profound.

this is a less charitable merope than i usually write, but there is no doubt that - in her extra-creepy form as she is here - she’s the perfect main character for folk horror. indeed, the whole story of her and tom is made for the genre: little hangleton - too-quiet and bucolic, with the gaunt shack lurking on the horizon - is the ideal location for a tale of rising terror, as the hunters on hangleton moor fail to realise that one of their number is being hunted himself. other bits of foreshadowing - the yew tree on the riddles’ property, the ruby ring shown off at a new year’s eve party -  and of folklore - the blackthorn trees which surround the gaunt shack have a reputation in britain and ireland for being trees of ill-omen, associated with witches, illness, and death - add to that sense of the inevitable.

the riddles are also the ideal folk horror victims because they think themselves rational. tom rejects the village superstition about the gaunts - unlike cecilia, who comes to believe in magic and manages to survive the whole experience relatively unscathed as a result - and, therefore, finds himself in the guise of the person in the story most at risk from the magical world: the person who considers himself to clever to believe in it and who does not notice the potion shimmering in the water merope offers him.

tom sr. is - in all my writing - very like his son. he loves to be adored, he is cruel and imperious, he hates being wrong, he is distressed to be thought mad. in this story, he even has his son’s dark eyes - which, normally, i think he inherits from merope. it should, then, not be a surprise that - like many other people whose lives his son will ruin - the thing that upends his life is a potion which causes insatiable thirst and results, in the end, in him living a half-life as little more than an animated corpse.

[lunarfeat21]

I honestly really love how much you enjoy RiD15. That show gets too much hate.

From what I understand it’s suppose to be the sequel to Transformers Prime, and the hate seems to be coming from adult audiences from Prime + other fandoms than to new younger fans (the show’s main target audience).

Despite being a sequel and getting backlash, I say it’s not the worse, but not the best despite me not formulating strong criticism like other fans. Don’t get me wrong, it had weird moments and expected the show to follow through the events after Prime, maybe a mention or recurring characters appearing (we kinda got some, but they’re short lived on screen).

I don’t hate it, but dislike the writing in some episodes and I understand where the fans are coming from.

Overtime it grew on me, from the character designs, personalities, a noticeable amount of femmes, animal decepticons, and sceneries.

It became my weird obsession and nightly pass time if I can’t sleep without knowing what the next episode is about. I have to admit, nearly a few characters are my favorites. The show became my fave along with two others (tfa & tfp)

At the end, it’s one of my faves and wooed my heart.

So yeah, I enjoy it :D

[theliteraryluggage]

I want more body (I want more soul)

Fullmetal Alchemist | Febuwhump 2024 | M | Ch 1/8 | Rape/Non-Con | Edward Elric/Truth | Existential Horror | Heavy Angst

“No.” “N—what do you mean, no?” “I mean no. We don‘t have a deal.” Edward took a deep breath, forcing himself to stay calm. He‘d just punched out one God, and this one was skirting the line. He was exhausted, his entire body hurt, he was dizzy with blood loss and he just wanted to take Al home. “You‘re telling me my Gate isn‘t enough of a toll?” Truth tilted its head, a thoughtful twist to its impression of a mouth. “It‘s enough”, it said, “but I don‘t want it.” -- Edward bargains something else for Alphonse's body, because there's nothing he wouldn't do for his brother.

My contribution to @febuwhump 2024! Day 1: Helpless

[wispforever]

I really like your headcanon about Sasuke and Naruto finally getting together in the end, even after marrying women and having kids. Do you have any good fanfic recommendations that portray how it all plays out? I want something that's slow burn, close to canon, and not OOC.

So far, I've read "My Lost Himawari" and I think it does a pretty good job. Naruto and Sasuke are finally together! The author also nicely portrays resolution in Hinata and Sakura. Boruto, Himawari and Sarada are included too.

Side note, I've been listening to AI covers with Naruto's and Sasuke's Japanese voices singing Naruto openings and endings. They add another dimension to the SNS fandom. Amazing!

To be honest, I don't read a lot of fic, so I'm not the best person to ask. I enjoy a good read every once and a while, but college really exhausted that part of me. Hopefully someday, I can get it back.

At any rate, you're always welcome to read my fic I wrote about Sasuke and Naruto a while back. Not exactly what you're looking for, but I'll leave a link here for you, in case you're interested :)

The AI is impressive and sounds interesting, but just a reminder, that AI technology is currently harming a lot of content creators and artists, so we should all show our support by staying mindful of the bigger picture and keeping our endorsements at the minimum until all this shit is a little more regulated and there are laws in place to protect people's rights <3

[alulangel]

Okay so cas “doesn’t get words wrong” and he said he’s a wavelength of celestial intent, what the hell does that mean ??? Wave packet probably would have been more accurate but I’m choosing to believe that there is a linear “celestial intent” wave and relationally, the angels are the measurements between the crests. How does that work ??? Why does it matter ??? Why did I spend two hours researching wave attenuation and then grossly oversimplify everything I sort of learned ???

Well I’m writing porn for stabfest and—

[astramachina]

one thing you need to know about me is that everything i ever write has some nod or reference to the gothic. it's not always aesthetically, but there's always a theme or a motif hidden in there somewhere.

the mall? an entire island? a studio? they're stand-ins for the traditional "haunted house" in the way that what they harbor is dark and damp and rotting away and consuming the characters that move through them. the family secrets aren't always the driving force of the story but they haunt the narrative from beginning to end.