#coronaria

Smelly peasants walked about in that road. Carrying to their hard labored backs stacks of hay and other wheat farm sacks. Their eyes never drifted from the ground, as the black coach passed them by. 

They knew not to look. The black carriage only meant bad news for whoever was delivered. The classy driver, decked in a full raggy suit would ask no questions and the blackened horses would never stop unless a special password was issued, as their black hooves stomped on the ground with gusto as they trodded around the small mud village.

Dirty faces mixed with the original stroll of some nobleman, the towncenter had just enough pavement to be called that. The black coach then stopped upon the whispering of the driver to the horses.

Out of the door came a shadow. Its hardlines made it difficult to distinguish, but a rat tail pended by the floor.  It looked around for a couple of times before the driver's anguished voice spoke.

“Bring! Justice to the damned! Punish! The! Heretic!” his old man voice was shouted at intervals as he pointed a crooked finger towards it and then whipped the horses back to movement. Driving a full circle around the town's center, hed leave the muddy village, leaving the shadow behind.

In the middle of the night, it hadn't been easy for him to blend in. Candles, reflections, fireplaces, everything was dark, and he had been moving for a couple of hours by foot, much to his dismay. Opening through the unclear path, up the hill, a single house stood in between the thick woods. The fire wasn't lit, but he could smell the living inside. But also the dead.

The cracking of magic, like gunpowder could be physically felt, as his nose scrunched upon the musk. Kicking the door open, he prepared for a fight that wasn't there. The man had sat on his chair for the remainder of his short life, holding an old coif and a small hand-drawn portrait of a young woman. Without a fire, he died of cold during the night, his tears freezing on his cheeks.

He only had to do but one thing, trace the sinful necromantic creature that had spawn and eliminate it too. Down the crooked hut, disposed of anything valuable or really worth a penny, he had found a trap door.

After opening it, a set of stairs led into a much more elaborate basement, with tables, vials and all sorts of illegal magical items. Open books about necromancy aside, in a cage, held by just a small thin-soiled blanket was the creature. Or so he thought, since no other thing could be heard inside of the house.

The trickle of magic items, potions and shiny objects provided with enough shadows for the being to slip by, undetected, and it wasn't until it was directly under the shadow of the abomination that he could really appreciate her.

A cold room led her to be freezing, or so he thought, as trembling as a living being was, it couldn't be that an undead, however, would be cold, right?

“Are you cold-freezing?” his raspy voice asked. Cold and weird were his words. Masked face and all nothing could be read from his expression save for the two red-beady eyes that examined her then, curiosity, but also alarm showing up.

Wasping and whisping, so much effort had been taken in place for such a thing to happen. Dangling from the roof of the sewer, was such a convoluted creature. Half spider, half woman. The tight coils and metallic threads keeping her from any movement dug into her skin, making it bleed there where it did so.

This job, however, was not finished. Still unconscious, he had to wait until she was brought to herself to do the second part. This monster hunt hadn't been easy. From the start, it had been a sketchy business. Travelling to such a faraway land in pursuit of such a secretive and well-bolstered creature. It had taken him weeks to track her smell and hideout, before using his magic to sneak in her lair and poison her unconscious. Dragging her through her shadow had proven even harder when it took him much more than usual in between jumps.

But he had finally gotten her to one of his safe houses, underneath the sewers and propped her up. If it hadn't been for the extra poison he had packaged she would’ve woken up during the travel. But now weakened and safely assured, she would be allowed to regain consciousness before the whole world dropping. This creature would never see sunlight ever again.

His black-clad hands fiddled with a small shiv as, waiting on a nearby chair, he watched the clamped mess of insect hair and soft human skin dangle. Distractedly, soon, would she awake.

An extinct snail, from the extinct Zygopleurid family.

Described in 1918 as Coronaria spectabilis by Charles Taylor Trechmann. Trechmann (1885-1964) was an English chemist, amateur archaeologist and geologist who made important contributions to geological knowledge of New Zealand and the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

The Oretian and Otamitan stages cover 227-217Mya. The Zygopleuridae lasted from the Carboniferous to the Paleocene (326.4 to 48.6 Mya).

In the language of flowers, the flower for today, October 20, is Rose Campion, which signifies gentleness. Image from Wikipedia. Silene coronaria, still sometimes called Lychnis coronaria in the UK, is a short-lived perennial of the pinks family that originally came from southwestern Europe but has been so long grown in gardens it is found in most temperate climates around the world. Image…