We are dust and shadow.

‘There were two sisters, they went playing, 

To see their father’s ships come sailing…

And when they came unto the sea-brim

The elder did push the younger in.

Sometimes she sank, and sometimes she swam,

‘Til her corpse came to the miller’s dam

But what did he do with her breastbone?

He made him a viol to play on.

What’d he do with her fingers so small?

He made pegs to his viol withall.

What did he do with her nose-ridge?

Unto his viol he made a bridge

What did he do with her veins so blue?

He made strings for his viol thereto.

What did he do with her eyes so bright?

On his viol he set at first light.

What did he do with her tongue so rough?

‘Twas the new till and it spoke enough.

Then bespake the treble string,

‘O yonder is my father the king’.

Then bespake the second string,

‘O yonder sits my mother the queen’.

Then bespake the strings all three,

‘Yonder is my sister that drowned me’.

I decided to have a little go at a cover of the Weaver’s song from @sjmaas‘s ‘A Court of Mist and Fury’. Tried my best to make it as unsettling as possible, as any good faerie song should be!

Want to make a delicious, low calorie, simple, delicious sorbet? You will have the great flavour of the herbs as well as their medicinal properties and benefits.

Ingredients: *½ cup superfine sugar *1 cup water *¼ cup leaves of either spearmint, peppermint, chocolate mint, apple mint, lemon balm, or rosemary *juice of 1 lemon *1 egg white *extra leaves of chosen herb for decoration

Directions: 1) Place sugar in a saucepan and add the water. Bring to a boil, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. 2) Chop the herb leaves and add to the pan. Cover, then remove from the heat. Leave to infuse for 20-30 minutes. Test for flavor; if it is too light, bring to the boil again then leave to infuse for 15 minutes. 3) Strain the liquid and add the lemon juice. Transfer the mixture to an ice-cube tray and freeze for 2-3 hours. 4) When the sorbet is semi-frozen, whisk the egg white until stiff and fold it into the mixture. Return to the freezer for a further 3-4 hours or until frozen. 5) Serve the sorbet in individual dishes, and decorate with extra herb leaves. 

The Paths.

0 - Fool - Falling blindly forward along a course of action. Reckless creativity and bravery.

1 - Magus - Mastery of chaos and order. Action with perfect knowledge and power.

2 - Empress - Detachment. All is understood and everything is permitted.

3 - Hermit - The light bearer and keeper of perfect and secret knowledge.

4 - Dragon - Emergence. Self forming and self sustaining process. The process is the product. Beyond thought or conception. Simple being in action.

5 - Angel - Carrying out the design. Doing ones duty with perfect knowledge and detachment.

6 - Justice or Adjustment - Resolution of internal conflict. Change in self in accordance with will.

7 - Lust or Strength - Union of will an purpose unhindered by thought. Pure absorption in activity.

8 - Priestess - Agent of chaos. Impulse forward and onward. Perfection in unity which requires no explanation and for which none is possible.

9 - Star - Receptive creativity. Divine inspiration.

10 - Lovers - Perfect contentment. State of being where all makes sense and all is as it should be.

11 - Death - Experience and awareness of time. Knowledge of lack of control, that there is that which is beyond control.

12 - Fortune - Purpose uniting seeming random events. Embracing the random.

13 - Hanged Man - Seeking of higher knowledge. Suspension of action by deliberation.

14 - Devil - Heresy. Lies. Approximation of truth. Transmission of the light and its corruption by expressing the inexpressible, and yet it is this corruption that makes it useful, takes it from abstract to applicable.

15 - Tower - Shattering of unity of thought and sense by time and memory. Futility of thought to predict the future.

16 - Art - Pursuit of desire. Creation of that which moves us. Manifestation of love.

17 - Emperor - Domination of the external. Desire must be fulfilled by that which one does not control.

18 - Sun - The inner light. The confidence of knowledge. Confidence whether it be justified or otherwise.

19 - World or Universe - The object of desire. That which appears to be objective and solid because of our attachment to it.

20 - Scarab - Manifestation. The process whereby the shells of illusion control our future perception.

21 - Mask or Judgement - The thought of the self. The masks we wear and judge ourselves by.

22 - Bondage - The enslavement of our ego self to desire. The ego wants and believes it acts, yet lacks real power to effect change.

23 - Mirror - The process by which a thing look upon itself and discerns self from other. Futility of knowledge of the objective in acknowledgement of the reality of the subjective.

24 - Rapture - Product of pure desire that craves nothing and all things.

25 - Moon - Qualia. The redness of red. The sense of experience apart from its information content. The awareness of that which cannot be known or described but is experienced.

26 - Aeon - The advancement of knowledge beyond knowledge. Knowing the limits of what can be known. Speaking in silence.

27 - Shadows - The shattered unity of the objective. The multiple actual. Superposition in quantum mechanics. The multiverse.

Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.

This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.

Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.

I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.

And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.

You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.

So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)

Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.

They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.

Don’t go near big trees in the night

If you live on a farm, don’t look outside the windows at night

I have broken all these rules.

I’ve seen some shit.

If it sounds like your mom, but you didn’t realize your mom is home…. it’s not your mom. Promise.

One walked onto the porch once. Wasn’t fun. But they’re not super keen on guns. Typically bolt when they see one.

You think it’s the neighbor kids.

It’s not the neighbor kids.

Might sound like coyotes but you never really /see/ the coyotes but then wow that one cow was reaaaaaally fucked up this morning. The next night when you hear another one screaming you just turn the tv up a little more. Maybe fire a gun in the air but you don’t go after it. If it is coyotes then it’s probably a pack and you seriously don’t want to fuck with that and if it’s the other thing you seriously REALLY don’t want to fuck with that.

So in the south, especially near the mountains, you just go straight from your car to inside your house, draw your curtains and watch tv.

If you see lights in the fields just fucking leave it alone.

Eyes forward. Don’t be fucking stupid. Mind your own business. Call your neighbors and tell them to bring the cats in. There’s coyotes out. Some of them know. Most of them don’t.

Other than that everything’s a ghost and they died in the civil war. Literally all of everything else is just the civil war. We used to smell old perfume and pipe tobacco in the weeks leading up to the battle anniversaries.

We had ‘witches’ in the mountains (more like ghost-women who will snatch you up by making you wander in a daze around the forest like the Blair Witch before killing you or letting you back out into society but you’re… different). Or devils in springs or abandoned wells (don’t look too long into one or something will follow you). 

But we also had the cornfield demons. I’ve witnessed this many times. You’ll be in the passenger seat looking out the window and see red glowing eyes in the cornfield. No light shining in that direction. Just two red dots a few inches apart faintly glowing in a pitch black cornfield. They’re not the glow of deer eyes in the headlights. More like the embers of a dying fire. Sometimes, as you drive away, you’ll look out the back window or side mirror and you can see the eyes have moved to the edge of the corn field, still watching you. If you bring it up with the driver, they’ll call you paranoid, but grip the wheel a bit tighter and driver a little faster.

I just…yes. This. All of this. And then some.

You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to believe in it.

The first time I visited (more or less 7 years ago) my grandomother was very careful to warn me not to go out when it’s dark. She’s the same woman who taught me about myths and legends, and told me that there are things wandering around. We don’t know who they are, or what they are, but they like to stroll through the town when they know it’s quiet. Usually they are calm, but sometimes they try to get people to come with them back into the woods. They make you see things, imitate noises and voices. They won’t let you come back.

I was skeptical, but I obeyed.

Fast forward to 3 years ago.

I was spending the month with my grandparents, and it was only the three of us since my family decided to stay in Rome. One day around 9 pm (the sun had just set) I was in the kitchen on the second floor, reading at the table, when I my grandmother called me from the garden. The window was open, so I clearly heard her shout “Giorgia! Can you come down a second?”

It wasn’t the first time it had happened: my grandmother had a dog who was pretty old and had trouble walking, so she’d call me down into the garden from time to time to help her move him back inside. But she never asked me to go out at night.

“Is everything okay?” I yelled, still sitting at the table “You need help?”

“Can you come down a second?” she repeated.

I just thought “Meh” and stood up to go downstairs to the lobby and reach the garden- 

-and I met my grandmother in the hallway.

I asked her “You don’t need help anymore?”. She just stared at me, so I explained that I heard her call me from the garden.

“You didn’t look down from window, did you?”

I shook my head, and she calmly walked into the kitchen and closed the window.

“You shouldn’t go out, it’s dark.” she told me, getting a bottle of water from the fridge. Like nothing had happened.

“But I heard you call-”

“It’s dark, Giorgia.”

That’s when I fully realized that it wasn’t my grandmother who tried to get me to go out in the night.

Here in Central Indiana, there are two local paranormal sites less than ten minutes from my house. The first is Sunken Road.

Sunken Road is this little, one-lane dirt road that runs between two country roads. It runs through a relatively low-lying area that floods a lot, and is pretty marshy in general, covered in this patches of scraggly marsh-forest (a horrible description, but you know what I mean). At one point in the road, it drops down real sharp about five feet, levels out for maybe fifty yards, and goes back up. There’s where the problem is: way back when, they were trying to build a bridge over this dip, because it especially floods. No ones ever said why- I myself probably think it’s an Indian curse, as related to the second legend- but A LOT of people died trying to make this damn bridge. Horses and men drowned or went missing, to the point that they gave up building the thing. You don’t go down this road on a full moon; personally, I think moonless nights are just as bad. People say, on the right night- Halloween, the solstices, New Years, it varies depending on the version- you can still hear the horses scream as they or their masters sink into the muck.

If you disagree with me, unfollow my blog, block me and never look at my blog again.

Out of 19000+ followers I have, only one of you actually reblogged about this issue, yet a lot of you have reblogged and liked a picture by playboy about catcalling and that how men should never do it.

Additionally, I have received abuse in my ask box (which I will be answering when I can) and threats. In particular death threats and rape threats.

Throne of Glass Villains