#dark folklore

Nothing scarier than our own darkness.

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.

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?

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.

Once, O best beloved, when this part of Hesse was still known as a Landgraviate, one spring before May Day, when fires still climbed up the slopes of the Knüll mountains on this day and the goats would not settle, a shepherd boy saw something no simple shepherd should.

He was fifteen.

Sent too far up the slope too late in the day.

And too late in the month.

The mist was thick, and the sheep uneasy.

He followed the flicker of what he, rightly, thought was firelight. Until he came to the top of the hill.

Schwarzer Stock.

That’s what they called it.

There, between the blackthorn and the pine, fires burned low and circular.

Figures walked widdershins, silent as smoke.

One bore antlers. One wore wings like ash. One bent backwards as she danced, like her spine was no longer hers but a reptile’s

They did not shriek.

They did not chant.

They simply moved, around the stone at the centre, around the fire blazing bright, around the goat who did not blink.

The boy hid beneath the gnarled roots of an old beech.

He did not breathe.

When it ended, it ended all at once.

The dancers scattered like leaves, and the goat turned its head and looked straight at him.

And smiled.

He returned at dawn.

Said nothing.

Ate little.

Did not sleep.

But after that night, lambs never took sick when he tended them. And he knew how to took the beasts to spots in the old Hutewald no one had used in centuries. Wild dogs would not cross his path. But dogs would howl when his shadow passed.

He did not age quite like the others.

And once a year, on the last night of April, he climbed Schwarzer Stock again, barefoot, without a lantern.

Sometimes, he sang.

They say the last time he went, he did not return.

But that spring, the flocks were easier, the births smoother, and a single stone near the treeline was warm to the touch, though no sun had reached it in weeks.

And once, a child said she saw a man in the mist, with a crooked smile and one eye like a goat’s.

She never saw him again.

But the sheep followed her after that.

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.