Welcome strange soul. You found this blog all on your own? Brave of you to browse these parts of the internet all alone. Now, stay a while. Read some things. Maybe you find what you went looking for. And if you leave again - many do, don't worry, but just as many... can't. Well, if you leave me again just remember to tell others what you found here. And remember to be poetic with your stories - or tell the truth entirely.
Additional features: lgbtq+ characters, characters of colour, disabled characters, found family, the power of friendship, a lot of sarcasm, excessive use of metaphors
Summary: Insena grew up listening to fairy tales about brave humans fighting magical creatures. Those creatures, the stories say, are as cruel as they are powerful. As a human, your only way to save yourself from them is to run or - if you have a chance - to kill them. So when Insena finds an injured dragon, she knows immediately what fate awaits him if he is caught by the city guards. And she decides right then and there to save him against all rules and laws.
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Partial transformation - mummy rot is slowly turning you to sand, a near miss from a medusa left you with partially stoned body parts, etc.
Hypnotic suggestions from being mind controlled persist after the controller’s death, causing the victim to occasionally take actions to support the cause of a mind flayer cult that no longer exists.
Repeated demonic possession has left the patient with permanent gaps in their soul’s defenses, causing them to immediately get re-possessed if they go outside a consecrated area.
Post-resurrection trauma as the revived soul remembers an unpleasant afterlife.
Magical healing can get very weird if something is stuck in the wound. It’ll get you back on your feet, but you can get outcomes like “there’s a chunk of wood fused into your chest because the magic couldn’t figure out how to get the arrow out of your chest and just healed it in place,” and this can cause mobility issues or infection vectors down the line.
SHealth tied to something else - the health of a tree, the amount of frost on the ground, the inverse of another person’s, the political power of whoever cursed you
Curse of bad luck - makes any small illness or injury potentially fatal if not treated with anti-curse in addition to anti-infection procedures
Magical reliance on a magical or nonmagical substance - can have any number of side effects
Repeatedly being drunk by vampires can cause an increase in blood production and therefore high blood pressure and related ailments. Can be treated by blood letting.
There’s a lot of hybridization happening in a lot of fantasy settings, and that’s just asking for a lot of people with weird half-dragon genetic disorders. Works out fine for some people, not so much for others.
Parasitized by (insert creature here). If you don’t take the correct precautions to keep it dormant it will continue to spread and eventually hatch out/transform you.
Repeated contact with the undead has left you open to their influence - leading to hearing or seeing things that other mortals can’t, which can distort or distract from more mundane concerns.
Alternately to being more vulnerable to intrusion, one’s soul can form a scar that makes helpful magic more difficult to take in.
Sleep disorders that make one fall into an impenetrable sleep at a specific trigger, or to do so for years at a time.
Out of phase with 4D space, one’s body not connected to itself or anchored in place/time in the usual way. There could be a consistent two hour gap between the things you hear and what has happened, you might clip into the floor as if it was in a different place for you, or you might slide through the material plane in cross section.
Intermittent intangibility.
Split into two people, each with only half your traits.
Sensitivity to ambient magic - like the thing where peoples’ joints ache before a storm but for being near ley lines or people with a lot of magic built up or other magic reservoirs. - The potential for magic, but where the magic has not yet begun.
Heal spell dependency: years of repeated serious injuries being healed by magic causes the body to stop healing naturally. seen often in professional fighters and those with a long career in hazardous occupations.
the forgotten dread: memory modification magic has caused the subject’s conscious mind to forget some past trauma, but their subconscious still remembers, causing them emotions that they cannot explain or justify ranging from mild discomfort to blind panic when presented with triggers related to the aforementioned trauma. often encountered in cases where the subject has paid an unscrupulous mage to make them forget their past as an ill-advised alternative to therapy.
Psychically Transmitted Memories: the subject’s mind has been linked to another person’s and, although the bond has since been severed, they have retained memories or thought patterns from the other person that are difficult to distinguish from their own.
Negative Life Syndrome (previously “False Life Syndrome”): seen most often in cases when the subject is exposed to dark magic while in the womb, Negative Life Syndrome leaves the subject’s life energies tainted by undeath without making them truly undead. common symptoms include intolerance of radiant magic, aversion to sunlight, and the inability to set foot on hallowed ground; rare symptoms include healing from negative energies, sudden necrosis, and the desire to eat flesh or drink blood of living beings.
lycanthropy
Early Life Possessions: the subject was possessed by a spirit or demon during early childhood or infancy, and the possessing presence was in control of them when they learned important milestones, such as how to walk or speak. The subject is now dependant upon the possessing presence to help them perform these tasks or, in cases where the presence has since been exorcised, performs the relevant tasks at a level appropriate for an infant or small child.
Body requires nutrients not found in human food, and you must eat rocks, or gems, or some other alternative. You may or may not have the ability to actually digest these without magical assistance
Awareness of too many dimensions makes it difficult to interact with just this one - either to keep track of conversations, or walk to specific locations without ending up on another planet instead
Telekinetic psychosis - delusions tend to physically affect those around you (but HIGH chance for ableism in this one!)
you have flare-ups where your skin tends to slough off and be replaced by some other substance
After sharing life energy with a dying loved one, you’re now both trying to survive off one person’s supply. Like chronic fatigue, but if your loved one gets too big of a bruise you won’t have the energy to get up until it heals
living in reverse
stuck at a certain age
supersenses lead to constant overstimulation
you’re a changeling, and if you don’t have someone who loves you close by, you’ll turn back into sticks and mud
One that I like is the idea that paladins (and anybody else with supernatural immunity to disease) have their own “disease” in the form of severe allergies.
If you’re magically insulated from ever catching any disease, ever, your immune system isn’t getting any kind of natural use. So it overreacts to everything.
Being immune to being sick makes them “sick.”
Mages that have complications of their own magic, such as Pyromancers overheating if they don’t let off a fireball now and then, or conversely, being prone to hypothermia and needing their fire magic in order to stay warm.
Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped
There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.
For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.
Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.
They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.
Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.
If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.
If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).
There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!
The coppice and pollard systems are one of my favorite pre-modern things, it's just so visually unique and sensible, but most people haven't heard about it.
When you coppice, you cut the tree close to the ground, so only the trunk is left, then the tree puts out fairly straight shoots that are great for firewood. They would typically have these trees harvested on rotation so new trees would be ready every year.
This is a coppiced tree:
When you pollard, you cut the tree to the trunk, but higher, and let the branches grow for longer. They'll be be nice and straight (depending on species) with fewer knots, and suitable to various crafts without much need to work the wood. Sadly seems to be etymologically unrelated to "pole", though the branches from these trees were used to make poles. Part of why you do this instead of coppicing is that the shoots are out of reach of animals.
This is a pollarded tree:
It's very likely that you'd see something like this as a sign of civilization as you came toward a town or village, depending on the species of tree that they have available, though note that this is something you do when you have a timeline of many years, rather than something you set up for the year after.
Thanks for the great visuals! I'm fascinated by coppicing and pollarding myself.
These techniques were also used to customize the size and shape of wood for fencing, tool handles, basketry, and more. Or they might just be cut as fodder for animals periodically. Tree branches were even dried and put up for winter like we do fodder crops today, and called "tree hay". Willow is still often coppiced for the basket weaving market.
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YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries
Some other resources that might be worth checking out (not strictly about faeries but related):
The Corpus of Electronic Texts, or CELT, a collection of Irish cultural materials. This includes English translations of Irish myths.
Mary Jones - similar to CELT, and a resource we used for translations in the Irish mythology class I took in undergrad.
An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Mary Briggs, a British folklorist.
The Folklore of Cornwall by Ronald M. James. Unfortunately this book is harder to access and is often only in university libraries, but if you're interested in piskies it's a potentially very helpful read.
Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall by William Bottrell.
writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.
other things I'm bitching about but which could still be useful as writing advice for 1 eyed characters:
2. they're going to favor their sighted side, obviously, but it doesn't always manifest in the way you think. when I walk down a hall I walk much closer to the wall on my sighted side than on my blind side. which is the opposite of how it might seem logical to do that bc it means the world at large is on your bad side, but the reason is I can't fucking See the wall if it's right next to me in the blind side and I end up knocking into it.
3. door frames and poles are my enemy. If your character is smart this will not be a problem but for me it is. I am King of walking into shit I could absolutely see but couldn't tell how far away from me it was. on this note, their blind side hand is getting bashed into every jutting out thing in a 5 mile radius.
4. having 0 depth perception is less of a big deal than you'd think it is. Especially with driving. I've become a Much safer and more wary driver because I can't tell how far the other cars are from me. however I fucking suck at parking now. because I can't tell how far the lines are from me either.
5. you know how people who lose limbs get phantom pains? that happens with eyes too but like. phantom sights. for me it's like. a lot of bugs. like every so often my brain will just put something suddenly skittering beside me there. hate that.
6. it is completely possible to "get stuck" somewhere because your ability to tell how wide a space is is just Gone. shopping isles especially where bumping something or Someone is matter of embarrassment or potentially breaking something. it can be legitimately paralyzing and also irritate everyone around you because they can tell there is Plenty of space for you to get your cart through even if you can't.
7. if the eye is still in their skull it can still be the normal kind of painful. Glares off of shiny surfaces causing weird sharp pains you can't figure out the cause of are genuinely one of gods greatest tests of my patience.
I too am missing my eye and have advice. But first:
OP I've been missing my eye for 18 years and because of you I'm just now noticing that my neck does in fact list left. Now I will live with that knowledge forever.
1) depth perception issues are more severe if you lose the eye on the same side as your dominant hand. I lost my left eye and am right handed, and only have problems with close-up things. Like pouring water or threading a needle. Sometimes putting the pump in for gas. Walking down stairs is a huge problem I have (walking up is fine), but unlike OP I don't have issues with doorways. Depth perception is different for everyone
2) I've completely lost my eye and need to wear eye patches, no fake eye here. People like me do still rub their "eyes." We also usually say "eyes" and "contacts." Except for comedic effect
3) the people that are in your life with regularity just... forget you have only one eye. Even if, like me, you wear obvious eye patches. This means they get confused when people asked what happened. They'll walk on your blind side and get snippy when you run into them. When my sister learned how to cross her eyes she ask me if I could do it, and it took so much coaching for her understand why my answer was no, and that I would not be "just trying." So don't write everyone around them constantly noticing. Most people don't
Also in the blind/missing an eye club for the past 5 years.
I was cross dominant, as in right handed but my left eye was my main looking eye, and i lost that one.
Little experiences
1) In my daily life I've gotten so used to wearing an eyepatch (its part of my glasses) that when people ask what happened it trips me up because I forgor that it's a thing until it causes issues
2) Cashiers who try to hand me the items I bought/the receipt is the bane of my life, pleaaaaase just put them on a surface and not embarrass me because I can't tell where in 3d space your hand is and I miss grabbing stuff
3) If I'm walking with someone and they end up on my blind side, and don't get why I want them on the side I can see them on??
4) BUSHES AND TREES when I'm walking and at last second I realise I'm walking into a plant and flinch hard when I finally see there's a thing in my face
4.5) Also poles and doorframes suck
5) I've gotten really bad at judging the width of spaces, which because anxiety I go on the side of caution, and asking people to move so I can get past, when to them they can tell there's enough space, is really embarrassing.
6) I think my night vision is a lot worse? Having only one eye so you get half the light, so walking in the dark is really tricky. But maybe I had bad night vision before and didn't notice.
7) Trying to play any game where you need to catch something, I just get hit in the face. but I'm still very good at throwing somehow.
8) When I'm cycling and need to check stuff on my blind side/behind me on that side, it's really hard to turn my head that much whilst balancing the bike im riding, and have crashed at least twice because of this.
YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries
Some other resources that might be worth checking out (not strictly about faeries but related):
The Corpus of Electronic Texts, or CELT, a collection of Irish cultural materials. This includes English translations of Irish myths.
Mary Jones - similar to CELT, and a resource we used for translations in the Irish mythology class I took in undergrad.
An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Mary Briggs, a British folklorist.
The Folklore of Cornwall by Ronald M. James. Unfortunately this book is harder to access and is often only in university libraries, but if you're interested in piskies it's a potentially very helpful read.
Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall by William Bottrell.
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Life as an ancient, immortal dragon is tough. I've seen empires rise and fall, friends and enemies be born, live and die, all seeming like a mere second. I saw the evolution of technology from stone tools to super computers.
But some things never change. The human nature never changes. They are resilient and hard to kill. But so I am. All the heroes that tried to kill me met their demise. How long is this circular story going to last? Will I get to see the death of the stars and the moon and the very earth I lay on?
@space-australians Feels like this would kinda fit your blog, specially for writers who want to make up weird human space shenanigans involving a ship and alien crew and what not. Maybe someone can write about how a person fixed a specific part in the dumbest way possible using the right words XD
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The decomposition process occurs in several stages following death:
Pallor mortis
Algor mortis
Rigor mortis
Cadaveric spasm
Lividity
Putrefaction
Decomposition
Skeletonization
PALLOR MORTIS
The first stage of death.
Occurs once blood stops circulating in the body.
The cessation of an oxygenated blood flow to the capillaries beneath the skin causes the deceased to pale in appearance.
In non-Caucasians, the pallor may appear to develop an unusual hue; the skin will lose any natural lustre and appears more waxen.
Occurs quite quickly, within about 10 minutes after death.
ALGOR MORTIS
The cooling of the body after death.
The cooling process will be influenced by many factors, including the deceased’s clothing, or whether they are covered with bed linen such as blankets or duvets.
The body will typically cool to the ambient room temperature, but this alters if there is heating in the room or if there is a constant draught cooling the body.
RIGOR MORTIS
Can occur between 2 and 6 hours after death.
Factors including temperature can greatly affect this.
Caused by the muscles partially contracting, and the lack of aerobic respiration means that the muscles cannot relax from the contraction, leaving them tense, subsequently resulting in the stiffening we associate with rigor mortis.
This stage typically begins in the head, starting with the eyes, mouth, jaw and neck, and progresses right through the body.
The process is concluded approximately 12 hours after death (although, again, certain variables may occur) and lasts between 24 and 72 hours depending on circumstances.
Contrary to popular belief, rigor mortis is not a permanent state and is in fact reversed, with the muscles relaxing in the same order in which they initially stiffened.
The reversing process also takes approximately 12 hours, when the body returns to its un-contracted state.
It is possible to ‘break’ rigor mortis by manipulating and flexing the limbs. This is usually done by undertakers, pathologists or crime scene investigators who are attempting to examine or move a body – or by a murderer trying to hide their victim in the closet or the boot of a car.
CADAVERIC SPASM
A phenomenon that can be misinterpreted as rigor mortis.
The instantaneous stiffening of the body (most commonly the hands) following a traumatic death.
Unlike rigor mortis, the stiffening of the affected limb is permanent and is not reversed, causing the deceased to maintain the rigidity until such time as putrefaction causes breakdown of the particular muscle group.
Examples:
The deceased following an air crash were later discovered still clutching their seatbelts or arm rests in a final, desperate act of survival.
In a drowning case, the victim was discovered with grass from the riverbank still grasped in their hand.
Perhaps the most famous case of cadaveric spasm involves the rock band Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain. Cobain reportedly committed suicide in April 1994. His body was discovered a few days after his death with a shotgun wound to the head, and tests revealed he had large traces of heroin in his system. He was reportedly discovered still clutching the gun in his left hand, due to cadaveric spasm. However, a great deal of controversy surrounds the veracity of this latter assumption, and indeed the cause of his death, with many people insisting and attempting to prove that he died as the result of foul play rather than suicide.
LIVIDITY
Also known as livor mortis, hypostasis, or suggillation.
Once blood can no longer circulate, it will gravitate towards the lowest point of the body.
Example: A supine body will display pinkish/purple patches of discoloration where the blood has settled in the back and along the thighs.
Occurs about 30 minutes after death, but will not necessarily be noticeable until at least 2 hours afterwards as the pooling process intensifies and becomes visible, finally peaking up to between 8 and 12 hours later.
Once it is complete, the lividity process cannot be reversed.
Therefore a body discovered lying on its side, but with staining evident in the back and shoulders, must have been moved at some point from what would have been a supine position at the time of death.
It is worth noting that if the body has had contact with the floor, a wall or other solid surface, lividity would not occur at the points of contact as the pressure would not allow the blood to seep through the capillaries and pool. The specific area of pressure will be the same colour as the rest of the body and a pattern of contact may well be evident.
PUTREFACTION
Derives from the Latin putrefacere, meaning ‘to make rotten’.
The body becomes rotten through the process known as autolysis, which is the liquefaction of bodily tissue and organs and the breakdown of proteins within the body due to the increased presence of bacteria.
The first visible sign is the discoloration of the skin in the area of the abdomen.
Bacteria released from the intestine cause the body to become bloated with a mixture of gases; over time these will leak out, and the smell will intensify to unbearable proportions.
Typically, this will attract flies that will lay eggs, which develop into maggots.
Bloating is most evident in the stomach area, genitals and face, which can become unrecognizable as the tongue and eyes are forced to protrude due to the pressure of the build-up of gases in the body.
At this stage, the body will also begin to lose hair.
The organs typically decompose in a particular order: starting with the stomach, followed by the intestines, heart, liver, brain, lungs, kidney, bladder and uterus/prostate.
Once all the gases have escaped the skin begins to turn black: this stage is called ‘black putrefaction’.
As with all the other stages of death so far, the rate of putrefaction depends on temperature and location. A body exposed to the air above ground will decompose more quickly than a body left in water or buried below ground.
During putrefaction, blistering of the skin and fermentation can also occur:
Fermentation - a type of mould that will grow on the surface of the body. This mould appears white, and is slimy or furry in texture. It also releases a very strong, unpleasant, cheesy smell.
As the putrefaction process comes to an end, fly and maggot activity will become less, which leads to the next stage.
DECOMPOSITION
The body is an organic substance comprising organisms that can be broken down by chemical decomposition.
If the body is outside, any remains that have not been scavenged or consumed by maggots will liquefy and seep into the surrounding soil.
Thus when the body decomposes it is effectively recycled and returned to nature.
SKELETONIZATION
The final stage of death is known as ‘dry decay’, when the cadaver has all but dried out: the soft tissue has all gone and only the skeleton remains.
If the cadaver is outside, not only is it exposed to the elements but it also becomes food for scavengers such as rats, crows or foxes.
As the remains are scavenged, the body parts become dispersed so it is not unusual to find skeletal remains some distance from where the body lay at the point of death.
The way in which skeletal remains are scattered in such cases is of interest to archaeologists, and is referred to as taphonomy.
Where a body has lain undiscovered at home for a period of time it has also been known for family pets, typically dogs, to feed on the body. The natural instinct of a pet is to attempt to arouse the deceased by licking them, but once it gets hungry, its survival instinct will take over and it will consider the body as little more than carrion: it will act with the same natural instinct as a scavenger in the wild, which will feed on any corpse, be it animal or human, if it is starving.
Obviously the number of pets, the body mass of the deceased and the time lapse before the body is discovered will influence to what extent it has been devoured.
For further research on the stages of decomposition and the factors that affect it, look up body farms. These are medical facilities where bodies are donated for research purposes so scientists can specifically observe the decomposition process. However, be aware that some of the images are quite graphic.
Source ⚜ More: References ⚜ Autopsy ⚜ Pain & Violence ⚜ Injuries
Bereavement ⚜ Death & Sacrifice ⚜ Cheating Death ⚜ Death Conceptions
