#sarafina

With my apologies, I am extending Heart and SOUL’s hiatus.

Hello everyone, it’s been a while. Unfortunately, things are still fairly chaotic over here.

The good news: my friend has healed wonderfully! And after returning home, I volunteered to help with my Alma Mater’s geology field studies program, which meant I spent a few weeks traveling around and camping in some of the most beautiful places the USA has.

The bad news: I injured my hands slightly on the trip. I’ll be fine, it’s just a slight stress injury, but I’ve needed to rest my hands for a while.

The worse news: my living situation has suddenly become uncertain (the joys of being a renter). Now my time and energy need to go towards fixing that in an area where the housing/renting has been getting harder to find and more expensive for years.

I’m very sorry for the continued delay, and I thank you all for your continued patience.

See you soon,

TLK: You are enough

Happy Pride Month!

I wanted to draw Ni and Sarafina again and finally figured out a way to draw her without making her a Nala clone.

Nala and Sarafina's family tree! Lore below the cut :3

Sarafina by Philip Fracassi

This is Hell.

Philip Fracassi's Sarafina is about the monsters made of man by the unspeakable evils of war—the unending horrors with which we find ourselves face to face in times of battle and the endless parade of sleepless nights that follow—and how those evils dig their roots into our veins and spreads their wings in our hearts, filling us with a suffocating despair that tears us apart bit by bit until there’s nothing left but darkness; eating away at our humanity until there's nothing left but echoes of gunfire and pain and visions of death and agony and the promise of what awaits us in the eternal abyss that is hell.

"You think us monsters."

Fracassi manipulates the historical, witchcraft, cosmic and religious horror elements with an ease that makes the events throughout drill to the core of our basest spiritual fears, and takes the narrative and his morally complex characters to even darker places than expected, filling the reader with the same overwhelming sense of despair torturing his characters, and driving the themes home in a way that'll burden your soul for many nights to come.

"I suppose, at heart, we're all a little bit evil, aren't we?"

It took me longer than expected to become fully immersed in this one. I think having just recently read Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon had me just a little bored spending more time with characters lost in the woods, maybe? But once they reach the farm, all bets were off. The confusion and fear and jealousy these characters face make for a thematically interesting piece of horror, creating an unsure sense of dread that's horrifically fulfilled in the hellish events that follow. From there, Fracassi explores the concept of evil—highlighted by grotesque body-horror and the exhilarating use of biblical mythology—in a manner as creatively nuanced as it is utterly hopeless.

Have you always known my worst deeds? I wonder.

8/10