There are dreadful things.

[altered]

One more.

---

There will be acid blood and red-smeared grins and a million reaching talons in small dark places. There will be an eclipse. There will be smoke without fire, lightning without thunder, and the closing of every book.

There will be an end, but there will be no release.

[altered]

Contact.

Darkness has touched this place. The void is here.

The gloom is growing. This place is crumbling, the ages of erosion and softening to stately remains time-lapsed by flickering shadows. What will you do? Where is next?

But night has fallen. There is nowhere left.

---

The darkness allows beacons to exist for now. Puddles of understanding, civilization, cognizance. But soon they too will gutter and die, from spotlights to the last charred wick of a candle. From suns - to moons - to stars - to ashes.

Night has fallen. It will not rise again.

Tidally locked, gaze perpetually averted from any sun, until the conclusion is there is no sun left. No escape.

Where will you go, as the empire bleeds out around you?

---

There is sight so sensitive that even the carbon-rimed carcasses of stars pierce through heavy rains.

We know. We have seen that light.

In time, as the fires dim, we will move closer, taking those beyond their glow. Behind the walls, we will grow.

You will not be saved.

No one will be saved.

There is nothing left to save.

Night has fallen.

Contact.

[altered]

I am part of the Future. I am a gear in the ticking clock. We will show you the path and drag you down it. We will drive you off of cliffs as early humans did Pleistocene megafauna. The Future doesn't care and won't listen.

The Future won't pass you by. The Future Wants You.

The Future is a Devil's carriage, helmed by lunatics, racing down the mountains. The Future is always gaining on you, even after it's run you over.

The Future is hungry. The Future can eat like no tomorrow.

The Future is coming. The Future Wants You. Act now, or wait and see.


---


This piece owes Howl a large debt.

[altered]

There are knives, yes, and guns. Axes and hammers, the weapons of the civilized. Tools for soft things without iron hides, mortar-shell minds, teeth that can cavitate the interstellar medium.

There are a million dooms, countless terrible ends, and more ways to suffer than there are ways to die.

But there is also time. Patience. Lying in wait, predator-languid in high places or perched like gargoyles, watching the comings and goings of the flock.

There is the knowledge that you are watched. The cold feeling of a LAM's static-hazed light brushing an outstretched hand. Reflections in the trees when the lights gutter and die. Breathing in the crawlspace. The soft clatter in the walls.

There are the trace fossils, dried mud from the bedroom window to the kitchen and back. There are the restless nights hearing rustling in the hedges, a barking dog swiftly silenced, a cracking branch.

There is knowing there are more of you, but that you never know when we will arise, alien seeds in the gene pool sprouting from the ground with stiletto roots, bladed petals, garotte vines constricting until the blood pressure turns you into a raspberry lawn sprinkler. Never knowing if the dead eyes watching you recognize you as friend or foe. Prey or plaything. Person or meat.

There is knowing that you could have stayed quiet, but that you were consumed, as in the Greek myths you pretend to be fond of, by hubris. That the Erinyes were drawn to your scent because you painted yourself in our blood. That your celebration drew the vultures in close.

There is laying in a hospital bed, alone, shitting uncontrollably, watching the nurse who gives you a knowing smile before she pronounces your fate. There is knowing that there was never any escape, not once you threw wide the gates of the abyss and laughed into the infinite. There is a peaceful death, abandoned, despised, paranoid, after a lifetime of failing to avoid the lidless eyes you awoke.

We always get our prey.

[Scribbly]

"alien seeds in the gene pool sprouting from the ground with stiletto roots"

"In their hubris, they have built themselves devils."

"Do not meet my gaze. I am the basilisk, and your locked eyes will never be freed."

Basically everything in the OP? And more scattered throughout?

These are the good words, oh my yes.

I am amused that our work touches the theme from opposite sides, but your imagery is incredible.

[altered]

Heavily inspired by Laird Barron, Michael Kirkbride, Thomas Ligotti, Dok Howl, Frank Herbert, and handfuls of others.

It's more or less a mishmash of whatever is rattling around my skull and current events, dyed with occult imagery and poetic language. But it's the first writing I'm really, truly proud of.

[altered]

In honor of those who choose not to be called queer. Paying respects to those who call neopronouns delegitimizing.

This piece is to recognize the sacrifices of men who fuck each other and then criminalize those men who fuck each other.

I write this now in memory of the gays who buried historical trans activism. Let us appreciate the brave Men and Women who police gender. Tirelessly.

All due admiration to the LGB without the T. Fight that fight, brave soldier.

This is an epitaph. This is a memorial. This is the grave of the traitors and turncoats. Here lies the dignity of Those Who Wish To Be Normal. Hallowed be thy name. Rest ye eternally here, O brave fighters in the name of their own oppression. The worms will not come for you. The fungi will leave this pile barren. The grass will not feed on your fluids. You who sold your siblings down the river for two more days before the shotguns knock at the door, you will not be forgotten. Not by us. Not by those who bear the knives you thrust into us.

Chained carcass, bound revenant, spectre of cyclic oppression, we will remember your name and we will curse it until the graves boil over with malediction. Your caskets will become sulfur, your crypts uranium. You almost made it to heaven on our backs, but the angels shot you like rabid dogs in your thousands. We didn't forget though. Come on down. Come on down. Come on down. Come on down.

[altered]

Not a new entry, just some commentary.

I'm increasingly aware that my queerness is part of other aspects of me. Like, I'm "weird" on every axis but skin tone and language.

EXAMPLE: I used to be pretty normal as far as plurals go, but I'm starting to understand why a lot of the "weirder" plurals just say outrageous shit about their system and seem to have no interest in interrogating it further. It's just easier to say "yeah some aliens died in a war in another dimension and now they're in my brain" because that's what they're telling me and like, I'm not about to figure out a BETTER explanation for how the fuck they got there. What are people gonna do, call me crazy? I have voices in my head, motherfucker, that ship sailed, circumnavigated the globe and got sunk by time-travelling pirates from another world. So yes, my brain contains a black hole with gateways to other dimensions, all of them hostile and impossible. I have multiple batches of inexplicable space-aliens in my grey matter that can hijack my body if they want. Two people in here have trauma from horrible things that happened to them in the Elder Scrolls universe. What other explanation would you like? What would help you understand better than me just repeating it uncritically?

EXAMPLE: BPD is usually this really horrible thing, and a lot of that is propaganda for sure, but I've got a weird-ass subtype of it (quiet BPD) and then even more weirdly, my BPD is an asset in my relationships. You heard me right, it's a good thing. My friends and partners enjoy being enjoyed and knowing there's real emotional investment involved and that I'd hurt if they went away. I'm not JUST neurodivergent, my neurodivergence is divergent and my experience of my divergent neurodivergence is itself divergent.

EXAMPLE: I express love by hypnotizing people into hallucinating an otherworldly abyss where I, in the form of a titanic biomechanical serpent, surgically alter them in radical, often irreparable ways. Do I need to explain why this is strange?

EXAMPLE: I am religiously somewhere between ultra-orthodox Jewish, LHP occultist, neo-Platonist and Tibetan Buddhist. I am unwelcome in all of these spaces, but who the fuck is going to come and get me? I'm going to do my queer-plural exegesis of Torah, continue to explore Hashem through the lens of darkness, asperity and disgust, work at identifying the forms underlying reality to better recognize G-d's true will, and perform visualization rituals of purification and separation to use my spirit to cut away the unskillful parts of me. No one can stop me, or take that away from me. It's also (by nature) a path I must walk alone.

Queerness is multifaceted for me. It isn't just about gender and love and sex, it involves damn near every aspect of identity. And this is why ordinary LGBT labels don't work for me. Any bum can be trans, xenogendered, alloromantic, androgynous, lesbian. Queerness is shorthand for a set of values and a warning to expect unexpected, even offputting elements. Queerness tells you that I won't shut the fuck up, and that I'll throw down with anyone who wants to try to make me. Queerness tells you that I am an embodiment of dissidence, of never-enough, of fighting until they cut the power and maybe after that too. Queerness tells you that I'm not going to play pretend so you don't have to explain to your dad.

So when I see people talking about "oh don't say queer, that's terrible", I have to wonder what else they'd prefer me to call myself. Because there is no other word I'm welcome within, and honestly, they hate me almost as much as I hate them so I don't understand why they care what I call myself, particularly if it's something they consider insulting.

If it's about control, they have to know I wouldn't listen to them even if they pressed a gun to my head and threatened to kill everyone I hold dear. If it's about distancing themselves from me, they have to know full well that no one is going to think I'm their ally. It feels like something they never thought through, because if there was any thought behind it at all, they would have to know exactly why it could never really work.

And it's really funny to me, because in positioning themselves as The Good Ones this way, they've just painted a target on their own head. When the forces that want me ground up and fed to the earth have finished the first pass, they're coming back for these fuckers. It's nearly the definition of hubris, and it's hilarious, and I just wish I could get a courtside seat when the time comes so I could mock them and throw food and beverage.

[altered]

But here's a new entry. Part 12.

---

I said I wouldn't take it personally if you decided to get out while you still could.

I never said I wouldn't burn you in effigy for it.

[altered]

Who, when the thief returns bearing enemy intelligence hidden so closely for decades that it was near-mythical, would see them slain for a missing eye, a broken finger?

This is not even that. This is a far more serious offense. Being Without Permission.

Who told this, the best of us, that it could Be in a way that was not proactively offered to it? Who told this scoundrel, legendary, kin of Prometheus, that it was permitted to act so bravely and perform such a feat without having first performed the ritual purification of its nature, excising the strange from its bones?

Who indeed. No one told it such. It's a thief, a trickster saint, a mortal who took the devil's jewelry from his wrist while he watched it with alert eyes. It stole its Self, its identity, as it stole everything else. Taken without permission. Being without permission. And now its song is sung from town hall to dockside across the lands, and the tireless sentinels of Identity seek its end.

But it will steal the end from them and hide it away too. As will all of us, lurking in the dark, being without permission, growing, growing, festering and reaching grasping talons towards the city lights.

You can no more kill us than you can steal the names of the damned. If you had the strength, you would have already won.

Cower, sentinels. The thief is here, forever.

[altered]

THERE ARE DREADFUL THINGS 14: strike one
In honor of Brianna Ghey.
---
When the small people breathe hate, hyperventilate in it, they are preparing for petty wars. They will target militaries with no weapons, attack installations that contain nothing but medical supplies.

They are preparing to attack those who cannot hit back. They are preparing to take the lives of us who have not yet grown our irradiant teeth, learned to think collapsar thoughts.

They know if they aim too high, they will never be found. Excised from the skein of history like a splinter extracted from a sleeve. No gravestone to mark them. Nothing but an uneasy feeling where memory should lie.

But these are soft human fates. We are the hungry grin of emptiness. We will not forget. Our names will be engraved in eschatological portents.

Our blood will stain the seas. First red, then black with the thickness of it, then silver as it turns toxic, turns alive, as the vapor pressure swells out to reclaim all they have taken.

The headstones of their futures are engraved in the hate they murmur nervously. Their crypts are dug piecemeal, a shovelful flung for every crude knife wielded against innocents.

There are three strikes allowed. The first may be in error. The second may be from foolishness. The third will bring the ending of endings. Every mandible will snap shut.

Strike one.

[altered]

Give them nothing.

Dig the bullets back out of them when they fall. Burn the bridges behind you, and tear the roads up while you're at it. Make your cuts artless and unconvincing. Do not smile.

Erase names. Erase histories. Become mythical, because they deserve no truth and are incapable of recognizing it. Do not leave a ghost to question.

Do not leave fire: drown the flames and wet the fuel. Salt the earth and foul the water. Take even the air, if you can.

No matter how petty and miniscule, let spite drive you. Deny them everything, even the satisfaction of achieving a goal.

Let them claim the ashes, the mudpits, the steaming bones. Let them hold only ruins. Let them win only desolation.

It suits them.

[Doktor Howl]

PREACH IT, ALTERED!

[Doktor Howl]

(That last one struck a chord)

[altered]

Thanks. It's not enough to know your enemy these days, because they're willing to tell you all about themselves. You have to make sure they know you know.