#dark folklore

Nothing scarier than our own darkness.

you don’t get a love story.

you get quotas.

you get ownership.

you get a boy dragged out of the sea and told his only value is what he can produce.

on a remote island where the fish are disappearing and the economy is dying, one fisherman finds a solution:

a selkie boy whose skin he hides, whose body he controls, whose gift keeps the nets full.

the village knows.

the village benefits.

no one stops it.

and the boy everyone calls “fisherman’s boy”?

he’s not soft, not tragic, not waiting to be saved.

he’s sharp. angry. funny.

half-feral and half-performing, because when your body is treated like currency, you learn how to spend it.

but here’s the problem with turning something magical into a resource:

it doesn’t stay small.

and the longer they keep him,

the more the cracks start to show.

🌊 selkie myth but make it exploitation

🌊 aristocratic sea boy / foul-mouthed menace

🌊 “i’m not yours” vs “you literally are”

🌊 small town complicity

🌊 beauty as liability

🌊 survival, not romance

They never call it summoning.

They call it a game.

It always starts the same way, someone dares someone else, laughter too loud for the hour, lights snapping off like courage being tested. A bathroom becomes a stage where tiles are cold under bare feet, a single candle trembling as if it already knows what’s coming. The mirror waits, patient and unforgiving.

“Say her name” someone whispers.

Once feels silly.

Twice feels wrong.

By the third time, the air thickens, and the room forgets how to breathe.

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary

The mirror stops behaving like glass. Faces stretch, shadows linger too long, eyes don’t blink when they should. Your reflection begins to feel like a stranger who knows your thoughts. That’s when laughter dies, because something has changed, and everyone feels it at once.

Some say she appears behind you.

Some say she smiles from your own face.

Some say the candle flickers, and for a heartbeat, the mirror is empty, like you were never there at all.

They scream. They turn on the lights. They swear nothing happened. But mirrors remember.

For nights afterward, reflections seem slower. Bathrooms feel crowded even when you’re alone. And sometimes, just before sleep, you’ll hear your name, whispered the way hers was.

The game doesn’t end when the lights come back on. It ends when she decides she’s been seen enough.

Bloody Mary is one of the most famous mirror legends, it is simple, terrifying, and passed around in whispers at sleepovers.

Who she is depends on who is telling the story, there are a couple of different variations to her story.

The Murdered Woman

In this version she was silenced, and the world moved on without her. Now her name is the only thing that tethers her to existence, whispered in bathrooms and hallways where no one plans to stay. She rises in mirrors not to punish, but to be acknowledged, to make someone feel the weight of seeing her, the way no one did when it mattered. Her anger is quiet, heavy, and soaked in grief; every appearance is a reminder that being remembered is sometimes all the justice the dead are given.

The Condemned Witch

She helped where she could, and that was enough to damn her. Feared for knowing too much and loved only when she was useful, she was forced to face her own reflection as judgment was passed. Now she lingers in mirrors, carrying the ache of betrayal, her eyes tired rather than cruel. When she comes, it feels less like a curse and more like the penance of someone who was punished for her kindness and never been given the chance to explain.

The Blood Bathing Queen

She was taught that beauty was survival and aging was a death sentence long before the crown touched her head. The mirrors became enemies, measuring her worth in years and lines, whispering that love would vanish with her youth. In legend she is monstrous, but in the glass she is only afraid, clutching at eternity because no one ever promised she would be loved when time finally caught her.

The Ritual Born Spirit

She had no life before the chanting, no name before the dare. Each time someone calls for her, she becomes a little more real, stitched together from fear, laughter, and expectation. She doesn’t haunt mirrors because she wants to, she does it because that is the only role she was ever given. And when the room goes quiet, she fades again, lingering in the ache of a being created solely to be feared and never meant to be understood.

No two people agree on what happens after her name is spoken. But everyone agrees on one thing ‘Something follows you back’.

Those who summon her rarely leave untouched. Some notice their reflection lagging, eyes lingering too long in the glass, as if something else is learning their face. Others carry her in sound, soft breaths in empty rooms, their own voice whispering back at night. A few wake with thin scratches or an unshakable sense of being watched, not with hatred, but with quiet expectation. And some aren’t harmed at all, just changed, left with the heavy knowledge that they called a once human spirit into the word… and then you found out she isn’t human no more.

How to survive..

Don’t mock her.

Never turn your back on the mirror.

End what you began.

Leave the room calmly.

Avoid mirrors afterward.

The oldest rule, spoken rarely but always seriously:

If you see her, acknowledge her. Not with a scream. Not with defiance. Just recognition.

Possible encounters..

At a grimy sleepaway camp on an island near Seattle, a group of eight-year-old girls dared each other to play Bloody Mary in a dark, decaying bathroom lit only by distant cabin lights. When the narrator bravely stepped up and chanted her name into the mirror, noting happened at first, until the mirror suddenly cracked on its own. The other girls fled screaming, but she saw something move behind her in the glass. she eventually ran back to her cabin, shaken and scraped, and by morning they laughed it off like a childhood scare, but years later, the memory of that mirror cracking still unsettles her. What troubles her most is realizing how many people may carry similar stories they never speak about.

Some say Bloody Mary doesn't harm those who treat her like what she once was, not a monster. But a woman who was called.. and finally answered.

Tell me reader, have you ever called on Mary in the dark?

never sleep with your feet facing the door.

never trust a mirror after midnight.

and never tell a stranger what you dream about.

i broke all three rules.

A portrait caught somewhere between prayer and possession. the chapel behind him feels abandoned, but not empty the kind of place where the walls remember every sin whispered inside them. While the figure stands in front of it with that dead, knowing stare.

Bruised shadows, hollow eyes, old religion, rot, guilt, and heat hanging in the air. inspired by the darkness of Ptolemaea by Ethel Cain that feeling of being dragged through something spiritual, violent, and impossible to escape.

Some, O my best beloved, claim to have traffic with the moss-clad Moosweibchen who wander the wildwoods in the heart of Europe.

A peaceful and gentle folk the Moosweibchen are, but come the Raunächte, the rough nights between St Thomas and Epiphany, things go badly for the moss people.

The Wild Hunt is out to get them, and their only sanctuary lies in a hollowed tree trunk felled while the right words are spoken. Can they find none, their fate is sealed under spectral hooves, the jaws of ghost hounds and the lance points of the dead.

This is the tale of a woodsman who chose his words with care.

Jakob, a widowed woodcutter, lived humbly with his daughter, Elżbieta, in a cabin cradled by the woods they call Preseka. The child fell grievously ill as the days grew long. One twilight, Jakob discovered strange footprints weaving through the moss—a child’s small steps alongside the soft imprints of bare, clawed feet. By his daughter’s bed, he found sprigs of healing herbs not known by many. Elżbieta soon recovered, her fever broken.

Grateful but unnerved, Jakob ventured deeper into the forest. There, near a sun-dappled stream, he glimpsed them—the moss people. Small and ethereal, their hair and garments seemed woven from green-grey lichen. They stared silently, neither fleeing nor approaching. Jakob raised his hand, palm outward, and bowed his head. “I owe you my thanks,” he said.

They responded in their own way. One approached and pointed to a sturdy pine. Jakob understood. He hewed the tree with reverence, blessing it with the words “Gott wael’s!” before hollowing its trunk and setting it near a quiet glade.

Came Christmas and the Raunächte and the Wild Hunt rode. Jakob peered into the dark, muttering a prayer for his friends, the poor moss folk.

In the glade, the spectral riders encircled the tree, their one-eyed leader’s horn a jagged note. But the blessed trunk held fast, its power shielding those within. Thwarted, the hunt surged onward, fading into the frozen hills.

When dawn approached gingerly, Jakob walked the snow-laden forest. The tree lay unmarred, and from its base sprouted a single green shoot. Jakob tipped his hat and whispered, “Gott wael’s”.

The holidays may be sappy but your next read doesn't need to be as well. Get some dark fucky queer hatemance courtesy of my Enemies to Enemies that Fuck Unhealthily dark fantasy book INFAUST!

A witch with a dead familiar is an outlier and an ill-omen to every village they pass through. Rehan Nadir is one such witch. The only jobs available to him are terrible ones, and vagrancy is his only recourse… At least, it was until he heard tell of the town of Hamelin’s plight. Stories of a malicious entity, a chaos god, have tormented the village for hundreds of years, and like clockwork tragedy has struck once more: while the adults gathered elsewhere, the children were spirited away. No trace of them has been seen since. The town is desperate to bring them back. Very desperate. Finding and returning the lost children would be just the thing to give Rehan a new chance at the life he lost after the death of his familiar, and if all it takes is killing a god of chaos, then he’s more than ready to take the plunge and open that door. Unfortunately, he just didn’t anticipate opening a few more in the midst of dealing the finishing blow.

Infaust is a dark romance recounting the tale of the witch Rehan Nadir and the elusive chaos god known only as the Piper. Trapped in a world where even the very dirt wants them dead, the two must depend on one another to escape—and along the way realize that perhaps the definition of a happily ever after really is a subjective one.