I Like Dark Sorceresses

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

If your story has an idle nobility class, their culture shouldn't just be different from the general population, it should be an over-the-top caricature of the common folks' culture. Whatever the population generally agrees is ideal, fair, admirable, or good, the nobility will take into stupid extremes.

Contrary to the beliefs of many, people are actually not at all happy when they're idle - a person with no assigned task or duty will go out of their way to come up with one. And all around the world, whenever there's been an upper class with nothing to do, they've started to compete with each other over stupid shit, but always stupid shit that the culture they live in considers positive qualities.

From the noblemen in Europe challenging each other to a possibly lethal duel over insulting someone's hat, to a Chinese noblewoman being moved to tears by the beauty of someone's calligraphy, bored elites everywhere have always wanted to outdo each other in their expressions of possessing all the noble traits that this culture in particular holds in value.

You can, and should, use this as a way to highlight what the actual values of this society is. In a setting where being religious is held as an admirable trait, there is nobility coming up with new ways to one-up each other in their expressions of worship. Society that values art and music will have them competing over who hires the most artists, and who employs the most talented musicians. Aggressive, war-like people will have fuels to the fucking death over a stupid hat.

I had over 1k followers on twitter. This was the backbone of my art career! I had mutuals with artists who are actual honest to god household names, and had regular customers, and while it was still a VERY small business it was still a business in the art world. This new rule of not allowing links to other social media though would kill an artist, because the "marketing funnel" requires links to other sites.

Now? I basically have to start again from almost nothing. Because one oligarch threw tantrum after tantrum. Tumblr is my only real option, and lets be real, its still kinda chugging along. I have faith its getting better but for now its a slog getting any attention for anything.

There’s something wrong with the air. You stand in front of your grandmother’s house, arms wrapped tight around your stomach and try to take a deep breath. You remember doing this in your childhood, inhaling the scent of freshly mowed grass, fading curry spices and moonlight with the rough planks of the porch biting into your feet. Your remember the way your lungs filled until they were fit to burst and then watching the way your exploding breath disturbed the spider webs hanging from the gutter.

Now, it seems like no matter how much you breathe in, your lungs are never full.

There’s something wrong with the air.

You wrap your robe tighter around you and go inside. Your grandmother is not newly dead, but she is recently passed. The funeral’s come and gone and all that’s left is to sort her store of treasures and sell the house. Dusty bibles, cracked romances, piles of newspaper and dozens of leather-bound diaries. It seems like she never threw a word away. There’s so much of her voice still here that you don’t know if you’ll ever be ready to sell.

You pass through a cold spot on the way to the kitchen and grimace. Or, indeed, if you could sell. Did you have to disclaim ghosts to potential buyers? And, if you did, would anyone be willing to live alongside the headstrong church-lady that raised you?

Glass shatters in the kitchen as soon as you turn down the hall towards the bedroom. You pause, one foot in the carpeted hall, the other freezing on the foyer’s linoleum. You don’t turn. Even if you turned on the light to better see into the darkened kitchen, you wouldn’t find the culprit. This isn’t the first glass to break and there’s always more trouble to come if you follow where this ghost leads you.

Nana wouldn’t break the glass. Immediate panic. Your grandmother was frugal. She’d never destroy anything if she could help it. Think, fool.

“I know,” you say out loud and then pretend you said nothing at all. Your grandmother wasn’t a kind woman. She couldn’t afford to be. She raised your mother alone and, later, you as well. You know you were loved, but you weren’t cared for. That’s why you’ve been able to fool yourself for so long. That’s why it didn’t bother you that this ghost isn’t kind either.

There’s the sound of heavy footsteps behind you as you continue down the hall. They aren’t your grandmother’s footsteps.You tell yourself that ghosts aren’t obligated to keep the sound of their feet the same after they die. You know that it’s a poor excuse.

Baby, your grandmother’s voice pleads in your mind, think.

You don’t want to think. You’re a child and alone in the world. You came here chasing your grandmother’s memory and you don’t want to admit that the only ghosts she left here are the ghosts she jotted down on blank pages.

There is hot breath against the nape of your neck. You don’t turn and walk into the bedroom. It’s probably from the vents. Maybe you didn’t turn off the heat.

(The company did a week ago when you closed her accounts.)

Your grandmother was a simple woman with simple tastes. Her furniture is all matching oak, her closet filled with earthy gowns and her bedspread a plain green. On the wall is a frame of her favorite psalms and poems.

The frames of each psalm is cracked, the glass spider webbing and obscuring the words. The poems fare worse and the spectral energy that’s inhabited the house sent each crashing to the floor the first day you got here. All except one.

My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound by Thomas Hardy

Think, your grandmother wails into your mind.

It’s the newest poem added to the wall. Your grandmother’s last favorite bit of writing as her body failed her. It’s all about how the narrator won’t be found in his grave–he will be found in the best places, the memories and the events he left behind. 

Nana isn’t here either, you think. You shake your head and ignore the weight that settles on the opposite side of the bed when you climb in. She has to be. She has to be here because, otherwise…

So even though the brimstone in the air is making her eyes water, even though the ground is so hot it’s making the rubber of her soles soft, even though he’s looking at her with fire in his eyes, she’s not going to go throwing that away now. This deal is too important to lose her head now.

“It’s the standard contract,” the devil says. The pinstripes on his suit aren’t black like she’d first thought. They’re red and they shine in the red light of his eyes. “I get rid his cancer and then you give me your soul on your dying day. That’s a good deal isn’t it? You’ll have the rest of your lives together.”

She hunches over the paper and her shoulders shake. He thinks she’s crying right now, he thinks she’s trying to muster the courage to sign, but she’s not. She’s reading the fine print because it’s the only part of the paper that’s not red like the pinstripes of his suit. It’s black, blacker than anything she’s seen and she knows it’d be bad to let her eyes skip over it.

She bites her lip until blood wells. When it drops, it falls on one word. Just one. Her blood eats through the ink of this word, steaming and hissing. She breathes in the smoke and feels the word settle deep into her lungs.

Then, when she’s done, she stands tall and she looks the devil in the eye. His smile flickers when he sees that she’s got the same fire in her eyes as him, when he sees that there aren’t any tear tracks on her face. 

“Sure,” she says, heart a rampaging thing in her chest. “That’s a good deal.”

His smile returns full force when she signs it. He takes the paper lovingly into his jacket, presses his own bloodied finger to it to sign it, sweeps a bow, and promises she won’t see him until she’s on her death bed.

She knows she’ll be seeing him a lot sooner than that.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! SHE DOIBLES DOWN!

“Jesus actually survived the crucifixion” is legitimately one of the most terrifyingly viable heretical traditions you could start. It fulfills the exact ramifications for a popular and overwhelming heresy: It supports and glorifies Christ’s strength (so powerful he could not die in a meaningful way), encouraging different theological philosophies and understandings of the source material, and is COMPLETELY RUINOUS about the WHOLE POINT of Jesus as the Lamb of God. He is destined to die to take on the sins of all humanity forever so we can br forgiven. The death and the resurrection of Christ after his journey into Hell for three days is cosmologically as important as the Trinity. It is one of the pivotal foundations of the entirety of the religion.

If Jesus didn’t die, he didn’t die for us. That changes a LOT of things. But it is at its root a heresy which is not anti-Christian and is instead just a completely irreconcilable veneration.

Like, Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life, except the resurrection bit is metaphorical, because I’m too swole to actually die.”

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, but not really, for he made his only begotten son super fucking butch. Like, obviously way too butch to actually succumb to a little crucifying.”

“Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. The centurion said to him, ‘Jesus is too shredded to kill, he’s like the Terminator, nothing can take him out.’ Pilate sent Joseph away with nothing, for Jesus was indestructible.”

“The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified but absolutely did not die. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he was just taking a little nap. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He never died, you all really jumped the gun this time.’”