remember to use your imagination

Here ye shall find:

A daydreaming millennial of androgynous late-diagnosed autistic ilk. I write essays and drabble and sometimes I draw or sew things.

Ravenloft

I'm into the old Ravenloft novels and Gazetteers. I like sifting through the stories and pre-5e content like it's historical research. That's fun for me.

Costuming Barovia

Jewelry | Strahd: Part 1 | Strahd: Art Addendum | Shoes (coming soon)

Alek Gwilym

Alek is a man in P. N. Elrod's novel I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire. He appears as Lord Strahd von Zarovich's second-in-command during the war and his steward thereafter.

Stralek fanfics on AO3

OC Hall of Fame

Ezra Sunstar

My sweet fire genasi boy. After having completed both a Curse of Strahd campaign and an epilogue Descent into Avernus, Ezra is still going in a pbp rp, in which he has ventured into an alternate-universe Lamordia to rescue the love he never thought he'd find: Ernst Villers.

Creative Writing

Day 12 = It's the little things + torture

He's in his element here. There are few places where the man really shines, really settles deep into his own presence, but those few places, the environments which suit him so well, bring out such power in him that it shines red-hot in his soul. It glows up through the black of his eyes, sometimes bright enough the light casts a ruddy blush high on his angled cheeks. It's a sight few get to see up close—and live to comment on it.

"You're beautiful," I'll tell him later. I'll paint him in sultry metaphor with a silver tongue, and he'll grow bashful, awkward. I have to be careful not to abuse my own share of power, cowing him sweetly in this way, too often. But I enjoy the juxtaposition, the tender dimensionality hidden within the vicious Devil Voivode. Szívem, my heart.

He possesses the uncanny ability—several uncanny abilities, for which I can never tease him about his books again—to dissolve a man's flesh into component blood, liquefying skin and muscle, even bone, all with just the touch of his hand. Those same hands which gently turn the crisp thin pages of old tomes. The same hands which idly pet my hair when I've stretched myself across the sofa beside him and laid my head in his lap, just because I can. What a privilege it is, to lie together in death, all the ways we never could in life.

With his victims, spies and traitors on our land, he is methodical. The power in him roils beneath his skin, but on the surface, he is the picture of control. Regal. Cool and dry and expertly contained. But I see the way his eyes follow the blood which wells and pools and drips onto the flagstone floors. I feel the titillating stretch of his bound beast's back.

Later, I promise, they can run wild with me. He can let his hair down, get messy. Be free.

"I love you," I aim to tell him, every night, not only in words. I hope that he feels safe, no matter what power he possesses or has yet to master. I adore the subtle smiles he allows me, and the gleam of excitement that lifts up his whole countenance when he's hit upon something strange or clever. When he shares his odd findings with me, even when I don't understand the whole of them—Why, that's a gift more precious than gold.

Our prisoner's screams echo in the bowels of our castle. Sometimes I play the more gracious of two hosts, advising plainly against further foolishness—tell the fiend what he wants to know and maybe the pain will cease—but when there's no real hurry, I'd rather he take his time in exploration of his favored disciplines. I've been assured there is a great deal of detail in a body yet to chart and study. Plenty of experiments in the grim sculptural art of moulding flesh.

When we've uncovered everything we ought to know, I find an untidy smatter of vitae on his cheek. I tease him gently by licking my thumb to wipe clean his ashen skin. He bats my hand away.

But his fingers stay entwined with mine, and together we ascend the spiral stairs.

•.*.°.*.•

< Day 10

< Day 11 | Day 13 >

blugh

Despite aiming for a roaring good time with this one, I [classically] defaulted to the tender rumination end of the spectrum instead. Oops.

Day 10 = Fierce passion + blind me with your blood

“Forgive me. I thought I recognized you.”

“Perhaps you have. My name is Hann,” the man said, extending his hand for a proper greeting. He observed his pursuer with subtle appreciation as he did so, his dark eyes darting along the ample length of Alek’s frame.

“A pleasure, Hann.” Alek shook the hand and offered his own name. “Whither were you going before I interrupted you?”

“To the inn. Would you join me for a drink, Alek? I would know more about my seeming doppelganger.”

“Oh, no. Ages have passed since I knew him. I would rather know the man in front of me. Are you in town long?”

“Long enough, I think.” Hann noticed their hands still clasped together and politely withdrew. “Come.”

. . .

“Oh, God—” Hann moaned. His bare thighs rested on Alek’s shoulders, the firm muscle gripped by strong fingers. Hann’s hand curled into Alek’s hair. Alek’s fangs tore through the tender skin high on Hann’s inner thigh.

Tall, dark, and handsome. There need not be anything to delve into there: why his limited palate only drew sustenance from the men who looked too much like his lost lord. The deep brown eyes, the raven hair. Devilishly long legs.

Hann’s voice was all his own. Alek couldn’t quite imagine these salacious tenor cries coming from his old friend’s throat, but the fleeting urge to try curled in an uncanny itch around the pit deep in his stomach.

“You are delicious,” Alek crooned, licking a trickle of blood away from the wound left on Hann’s leg. He returned to mouthing other extremities, now that he’d taken the edge off his thirst for the wealth of blood amassed within. Giving head seemed more an exercise in discipline these nights than anything else he’d practiced before. The amount of control it took not to slice through a protruding vein was monumental.

“You are a menace.” Hann laughed breathlessly. He bucked and groaned. “What did you do? Bite me? It was heavenly...”

Alek hummed around the mouthful of engorged flesh, and drew back quickly with an inelegant wet slurp. Bite me? “Careful, love. I’ll do it again.”

“Please do.”

Alek gazed up at his new lover and the crease that formed alongside his mouth when he smiled. Hann’s thighs slipped off his shoulders as Alek rose up to kiss him. Alek tried not to wonder, as he did this: Why these men? Why so many ghosts of that bygone era? He certainly did not contrast their smiles, rare as those of his friend had been. Could he even remember that smile with any certainty? Or was Hann’s mouth now the image that would stay with him? Was his memory just a blur, a hodgepodge, of all the men he had consumed since Death had done them part?

“Shall I bite you?” Hann murmured against Alek’s lips.

“You may.” Waltz right into the hunter’s trap? Of course. “Would you like to?”

“I think I would.”

“I’m not delicate,” Alek assured him, taunting playfully, “Be vicious.”

Hann laughed. “Come, lay beside me.”

. . .

*.•.°.•.*

< Day 5

< Day 9 | Day 11 >

Day 12 >

Bonus! The prompt reminded me of my Vampentine's 2024 fic: What have I done?

Day 5 = Poison + what have I done?

How deep does it run, this river of poison? Blue until it oxidizes in the air. Which ancestor fell first? Their old testament calls her Eve—like evening, I think. Mother Night. But Adam’s skin broke open before Eve was born and his blood rusted while the sun sat watching. They say their god did it, pulled an ivory crescent from his flesh and molded it into a companion, but I like to think that Adam was an artist, creating to fill another void that Lilith left behind. To feel connection, Adam carved up his own rib. When Eve ventured deep into the garden for the fruit of life, she didn’t need a serpent’s whisper to imbue her with imagination. She was already infected with this implacable disease.

Sometimes I open up my mouth and only later realize what a parrot of my past I have become, tongue dripping with the onyx oil-slick of mindless criticisms I internalized lifetimes ago. No wonder you would hesitate to kiss me. Why you ran. Surely, you didn’t want to die. I am aware of imagining that I’ve become a villain in your story. Eve stalking through the twilight, brandishing a poison apple. It’s far more likely I appeared as no more than a blip: a glare marring a single frame of film. Perhaps a floater in the eye. Or, you’ve thrown me from your mind entirely by this point. Blinked. Clipped. Discarded. But the possibilities are endless, aren’t they? You were made with poison, too.

A fetal human is a kind of parasite, a vampire bathed in blood and leeching life force from its host. But you are what you eat, they say. You are what you’ve been fed. What lies were you limited to in the confines of your youth?

Heavy is the hand which writes the bitter truth. Or some semblance of it. What have I done but speculate? Imagine now the snap of latex gloves. The mind is an orifice we can pry open: Find it rife with silvered glass.

Deflection: the weapon of choice. No one sees the mirror when presented with their face. Black turtlenecks and blazers in a sea of books and bodies; I made my guess of what to wear based on your picture, and appeared. You passed me sideways glances. Coy, perhaps. Or paranoid. Each of your flaws, I mapped—the composition of your wide flat teeth, the cadence of your lies—but I decided this material would do. Oh, how I imagined, for want of ivory to carve. Would anybody miss you, darling, if I’d eaten you alive? But, in the reflection, I am speaking of myself, aren’t I?

The insidious trick: What have I done? I’ve bitten my own wrist and supped on my own blood. The poison was compounded in the cycle. In its taste, I re-imagined all that came before: The high school boyfriend cringing at my poetry, there in the creases of your face. The—

Ohhh... No, that’s all of it. I see where this went wrong.

The apple lodged in Adam’s throat was vengeance, all along.

°.*•*.°

< Day 4 | Day 6 >

Day 10 >