#ill haunt anyone who plagiarizes this shit from me

[bloomingdarkgarden]

you guys, lore-building is hard. writing and incorporating canon compliant plot when you wanna just lean into the romance so hard. send strength. I know why sjm chooses to have all of her FMCs trained/ mentored by their love interests, bc its fun as hell and provides so much easy relationship building and is lovely in its own way. but I cannot. And im giving it my all bc I have a dire need for Elain's story to evolve around her own journey equally in parts with her romance ... but good lord i need wine.

[monstersandmaw]

Dullahan ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ - Part Three (sfw)

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

Here it is! It’s Friday, which means its Choose Your Own Adventure Day! You voted to return to the clearing, so here we are, and we find out ‘D’s true name in this chapter too! This one is going to be a patreon-only vote, as I did promise that a few of the choices would be patrons-only. However, don’t let that stop you sending me asks about what you’d like to see next if you feel like it. 

Part One | Part Two 

The woods creaked all around you as you made your way reluctantly back to the clearing. Kravik’s face haunted you, that nervous, twitchy expression so alien to his kind, sharp, goblin’s features. He was the most even-tempered, sweetest, gentlest person you’d ever known, and for him to snap at you like that in front of everyone was… it was weird. The dullahan was right: something was horribly wrong in the town.

Shuddering, you started to look about you with more care as you drew nearer to the place where you thought the little clearing had been. You hoped you could find it again, but just as you’d begun to doubt yourself, you saw the distinctive oak tree, with its large roots and the disturbed patch of fallen leaves where the head was buried. Your heart was pounding and you took a very long moment to yourself before even approaching the tree.

Easing yourself down onto a fallen log first, you mulled everything over.

What exactly was wrong with this town that had got the dullahan so agitated? It had to do with the mine, you were certain. The mayor was harsh when it came to sentences and judgements, especially on non-humans, and she was certainly a woman who gave you the shivers, but it had to be more than that. You were certain that the baker’s wife was sleeping with the butcher’s wife, and that the assistant at the general store was definitely skimming money from the til, but again, those were petty things, hurtful to those immediately involved, but not large enough to send ripples out that would attract a spirit of justice, or whatever he was, like your dullahan.

You spoke all this aloud to yourself, and as you hugged your shawl closer around your shoulders, a pale mist began to creep in about the trees. It was eerie, and you shivered, not just from the cold.

“Oh, what the hell is really going on here?” you mused. “And how can I fix it? First the miners get ill, then Kravik’s acting weird…” As a rush of plunging adrenaline swept through you at the realisation that your best friend really was in some kind of serious trouble, you stood and brushed off your clothes. You had to talk to him. You had to know more. Gods, though, you hoped he wouldn’t be angry with you.

You crossed to the oak tree and knelt before the spot where it was buried in that dark, hardwood chest, your heartbeat thudding in your throat. “Shit,” you muttered. “I’m sorry. I have to. I have to talk to you.”

“I’m here,” a male voice chuckled, amused, from behind you and you screamed in shock, clutching your chest and whirling around in a spray of crunchy leaves to see the dullahan standing between the trees on the other side of the clearing. His usual greenish mist swirled in abstract patterns up from the empty opening of his neck, and you gulped at the strangeness of the sight of him.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t want to startle you, and I missed my moment to interrupt a while back…” His horse was nowhere to be seen, and he looked… somehow vulnerable, smaller without her.

You jerked away from the chest, eyes going wide like a guilty thing surprised. “I wasn’t going to… you know…” Your gaze flickered back to the pile of leaves behind you.

He chuckled softly, the sound rolling around the clearing like distant thunder. “I know. I’m very good at reading people. You haven’t got a malicious bone in your body.”

The air left your lungs in a rush and you stood up, un-creasing your clothes with a few nervous swipes as you did. “Oh, well that’s a relief. Listen, I want to know more,” you said, “And I want to help.”

He folded his arms and, as he surveyed you, he casually tilted his hips in a way that you suddenly found extremely attractive. Surprised by your reaction, and hoping to hide the blush from him, you turned away and glanced down at the pile of disturbed leaves. Just how good was he at reading people exactly…?

To your surprise, he let out another earthy, rumbling laugh, and stepped closer, buckles clinking. “Would… Would you be more comfortable if… If I looked perhaps a little more… normal?”

“You mean…?” you asked, staring from him to the roots of the oak and back.

“Yes,” he said.

“Sure,” you smiled. “It’ll be nice to see you… you know… complete.”

He laughed and strode past you. He had lovely long legs, you noticed idly as he drew level with you, and you had to force yourself not to stare at his backside as he knelt down to unearth his cache. “You remind me of a highwayman, digging up his gold,” you said, not having the faintest idea why you’d said that.

At those words, he froze, but with a visible shudder, he began to excavate without comment.

You stepped back and watched in silence now as he used a nearby branch to dig up the chest, opening it with a growl of annoyance when he saw the rusty old hinges that you’d busted off last time.

Deciding not to comment or apologise, you kept quiet, and watched with a kind of morbid fascination as he reached his clawed, dark-skinned hands out and raised the head from the chest and settled it on his neck. There was a flash of green light along the join, like a blacksmith fire-welding white hot iron to another piece under the hammer, and he grimaced, gritting his teeth and clenching his jaw. It looked painful, and he stood there a moment, breathing heavily.

Then he stood up and looked down at you from his full height, and you saw him ‘whole’ for the first time.

He was gorgeous.

That was honestly the first thing you thought. The sharp planes of his face, accentuated by the strange, swirling, pulsing lines which curled and fanned like roots across his smoke-dark skin; the blackness of his eyes and the strangeness of the pearlescent white irises; the shadowy quality to his full lips, behind which were two long fangs like a vampire: it was all so strange, and yet so undeniably attractive. The line at his neck where his head met the rest of his body was a clean slash of shimmering green, but it was fading to a mere sliver the longer he stood there. You had so many questions about how a dullahan came to be, and what he was, but you bit them back for the moment.

“There,” he murmured after a long moment to compose himself. “Better?”

“Not necessarily,” you said, “Just different. But I like it nonetheless. You're really tall,” you added, unable to keep the girlish giggle from your voice.

With a soft smirk, he said, “I can sit down if you like?” The mirth faded from his face as though a cloud had passed over it, and he sighed. “What’s got you so rattled that you came all the way back out here to talk to a severed head in the dead of night, and risked the anger of something like me?”

“You wouldn’t hurt me,” you ventured. “Not for this at any rate.”

“Oh, you’re right,” he chuckled. “Come, sit down.”

“Where’s Midnight?” you asked casually as you followed him back to the fallen tree where you’d monologued your fears to the ‘empty’ clearing earlier.

He made sure you were comfortable, and then eased himself onto the log beside you, a polite distance away, but not so far as to be completely formal. “She’s resting,” he said, folding his arms across his broad chest. “We’ve done a lot of riding today, and I wanted her to relax.”

You smiled. “You’re such a mystery to me. I’ve got plenty of non-human friends, but I’ve never met anyone or anything like you.”

Suddenly abashed, he lowered his head and smiled shyly. His long, black hair slipped forwards over his shoulder and hung down, almost touching his thigh as he sat on the old tree trunk beside you. It was smooth and shiny as an oil spill, and thick too, with the braids which ran over his slightly tapered ears flowing all the way to the tip of the ponytail. Not for the first time, you felt the urge to run your fingers through it.

“I’ve never really taken the time to get to know a human either,” he admitted. “And… I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you earlier.”

You frowned, puzzled.

He unfolded his arms and braced a hand on each side of his hips on the log, his whole body tensing up. “I called you something to the effect of ‘a simple backwater apothecary’. I can see you're much more than that, and I knew that at the time. I shouldn’t have said it.”

On a sudden, surging impulse, you reached out and touched his hand where it sat, claws digging into the rough bark of the fallen tree beneath you. He jumped as though you’d given him a static shock, and stared up at you, his white-irised eyes wide. “It’s alright,” you said. “I say things I don’t really mean when I’m scared too.”

“I’m not scared,” he scowled. “I’m just… frustrated.”

He gave a cavernous sigh, and you watched the eerie veins of green across his face pulse suddenly, flaring bright as a shooting star, only to fade back to their usual phosphorescent glow a moment later. You couldn’t help but wonder if they went all the way down his body, and then that thought led you into more ‘inconvenient’ ideas.

Mercifully, the dullahan interrupted you before your face could flush too hot. “What did you want to tell me?”

“I think there’s something going on with the mine,” you said slowly, still reluctant to bring Kravik into this despite your worries for him. “I think… I don’t know if they’ve uncovered something they’re not telling us about, or if something else is going on, but I think the mine is at the centre of it.”

“So do I,” he said. He still hadn’t removed his hand from underneath yours, and you made no move to withdraw it either. His skin was cool, as though he’d been outside in the winter air a long time, and the back of his hand was soft but leathery somehow. The thought of what his palms would feel like across your bare skin flashed across your mind and your eyes went wide before you could stop them. Blushing again, you looked away. You did not withdraw your hand, however.

He didn’t appear to notice your discomfort, however, and was too busy grinding his jaw. “You’re right,” he eventually said through clenched teeth.

Frowning, you squeezed his hand. “What’s going on?”

Closing his eyes, he drew a deep breath, and then looked up at you. There was something in his eyes, some emotion, that you couldn’t quite read, but it ran deep, right down to his core. “I don’t know - yet - but whatever it is, magic is at the heart of it.”

“Magic?”

He nodded. “Tell me something: you seem to know at least a little about my kind, or at least the legends that folk seem to like to tell each other…”

“Yeah…” you said slowly.

“Then you know the saying that no door or gate is barred to us…?”

You nodded, having indeed heard that one. “What about gold? Doesn’t that keep you away?”

A shiver ran through him and he laughed at his reaction. “Yes, but not permanently. Not like this…”

“Not like what? What do you mean?”

“There’s some kind of enchantment over the entrance of the mine. I thought about what you said about the goblins getting sick, and how they were all miners, and I went to investigate. Only… I couldn't get in.”

“What?”

He rasped a sour chuckle. “Imagine my surprise,” he said bitterly. “There was some kind of enchantment over the entrance way, but I couldn’t see anything from the outside.”

He shuffled slightly, reaching into his pocket, and drew out a tiny blue shard of crystal. It didn’t glow under his touch in the same way as had the one Kravik had been holding, but he caught the unmistakable flare of worry and recognition in your eyes.

“You’ve seen something like this before?” he asked gently. “Do you know what it is?”

You shook your head, heartbeat hammering. If you told him now would he go to Kravik? Would he hurt him? Your chest ached and, torn, you looked up at him.

“It’s alright,” he said, finally turning his free hand over and squeezing your fingers gently in his. “I promise I’m not here to cause harm. I’m here to heal. That’s… That’s what we do, in our own way.”

You took a deep breath and stared up at him. “What’s your name?” you asked. “Or at least, what can I call you?”

He seemed surprised by that. “My name?”

“You do have one, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But we don’t normally just tell anyone, you know?”

“I’ve been thinking of you as ‘D’,” you chuckled shyly, and his lips curled slowly into an amused and surprisingly affectionate smile at that.

He let another gentle laugh roll out of him and you found yourself smiling too. For something so otherworldly, he was remarkably easy to get along with. “I rather like that, I think. But… you may know my name, I suppose,” he said.

“Wait,” you chirped, suddenly remembering something about dullahan. “Aren’t you a kind of fae?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I am.”

“Then…”

“I trust you,” he said quietly. “After all, you could have wielded power over me when you first found my head earlier, but you didn’t.” He took a deep breath and looked at the forest floor beneath his polished, black boots. “When my kind are ‘forged anew’ we are named after concepts, in the hopes that we will embody them. In time, we usually do. The most famous of our kind has sparked a number of legends around a certain town in another part of the world. He’s called Wrath.”

“What do you mean by ‘forged anew’?”

“That’s a story for another day, I think,” he said. “Suffice it so say, dullahan are not born, but we are made, and if we survive the process, we are given a new name.”

You sat there, horrified for a moment. “And… your name?”

“Justice,” he said quietly.

You smiled and stroked your thumb over his. His eyes flickered down to it, and he squeezed your hand slightly. “It suits you,” you said. “I might still call you ‘D’ though,” you added playfully.

That adorably bashful expression crept back across his lips and spread over his face. “I’d like that,” he said in a hoarse rasp. A small section of his black hair flopped forwards into his eyes and he left it there as if to mask his face a little from your gaze. Coming back to himself with a little jolt, he held out the crystal again. “Tell me truly, have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked again.

Looking him straight in the eye, you licked your lips. You could tell him you’d seen it on Kravik, but that might bring your best friend into this, might put him in direct danger. The very last thing you wanted was for him to get hurt. But then again, if he was mixed up in something, and the dullahan really did want to help, it might be an idea to tell him. You knew his name, but he didn’t know yours. Yet. You still held power over him, and he was allowing it.

Taking a breath for courage, you gave him your answer.

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If you liked this part, don’t forget to leave me a like, comment, and/or reblog. You have no idea how happy that makes authors and creators like me, and it makes all of this worthwhile. Voting for this next one is patreon-only, but as I said, don’t let that stop you sending me an ask with what you’d like to see next! I’m always curious, and it might give me an idea to add in to the already-planned scheme! You’ve got nothing to lose! 

Become a patron for just $1 and have your vote counted over on the poll! Or, if you’re able to, join up to the Pixies and Goblins tier ($5) and have access to a monthly story (two this Orctober!), character profiles, works in progress, early access, and ideas! The decision at the end of Part Four will be open to everyone again. 

Options are:

Lie and tell him you’ve never seen a crystal like that before

Tell him you saw your friend Kravik with something that glowed like that earlier that day

Votes will close at 12pm (GMT) on Wednesday 3rd October [day before my birthday])

PART FOUR

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