Full moon in Gemini group ritual✨

I host group rituals every new and full moon ✨ I’ll have to start posting about them here if anyone is interested 🥹✨

The Wizard in training winced as he shooed the goat into place. He hated it, but when one summoned beings from other planes- well, you have to have sacrifices. And a goat was the best one he got.

He swallowed as he slowly lit each and every candle. Everything was in place, the rune covered golden horn was attached, the back of the sacrifice was adorned with runes, and he had the controller rune in hand. All he had to do now was summon it. The Chaos Demon the Archmage needed.

..Well, not exactly needed. The Archmage just wanted a show of power before they accepted any more students. And if he, Alder Heldar, First of his Name, managed to bring a trapped Chaos Demon? His seat next to the Archmage was guaranteed.

So with a slow breath, he started the spell.

His magick slowly coursed through his arms, then his hands, and finally into the summoning circle. With a sharp swallow, he closed his eyes and prayed. He prayed to Amaunater, in hopes the lawful deity would keep the summoning circle stable. He prayed to Asmodeus, in hopes that the deity would allow one of his devils to accept. He even prayed to Beshaba that nothing would go wrong-

And right as he whispered her name, he felt the air in front of him crack. Biting back a wince, he kept his eyes shut. He could feel the Chaos devil’s true form eye him up- but he kept calm. All he did was swallow and force more magick into the spell.

Time went by slow. Oh so slow, but eventually, the feeling of eyes on him stopped, and the slight resistance to his magick fade. And the moment it started to fade, he pushed-

There was a panicked bleat from the goat, before a loud, almost fake and toony puff could be heard.

Keeping his form relaxed, Alder slowly opened his eyes.

In the center of his summoning circle was a short, bipedal goat. He looked absolutely strange to the wizard’s eyes. Weird pie cut eyes, no arms and no neck, and yet a head and hands floated where they should be.

Alder couldn’t help but smile. It worked. It worked! In front of him was a bound Chaos Devil!

Letting the excitement show, he looked down at the controller rune in his hands- and froze.

The rune wasn’t lit. It wasn’t powered. It wasn’t connected.

Slowly, and filled with growing fear, the wizard in training looked back over at the goat.

The goat was poking at his golden horn with one hand, and poking at the circle that kept him bound with the other.

“Ya know,” the goat started with a tinny voice. “I don’t think anyone ever summoned one of us with a living sacrifice!”

Alder ignored the goat’s words, his eyes locked on the golden horn, or rather, the spot on the golden horn that was supposed to be etched with the Listen To Controller rune. It was empty. Blank.

Everything else was there, the Steal rune, the bind to offering rune, even the resist chaos rune was in place.

But not the LTC rune. He forgot to etch the most important rune-

“Ah! Here we go!” The goat suddenly bleated, and with a shove of his hand, the summoning circle fizzled out. With a happy grin, the Chaos Demon bounced out of the circle.

Oh no. Oh gods-

Alder barely kept himself from hyperventilating as he watched the goat literally hop around the circle.

“A new form, breathin’ too! The runes are a little wonky, but they’re still there! And they work! Not many summoners would put a Stealin’ rune, but man! I’m excited! I’m seein’ all sorts of things I could nab!” The goat chirped as he zipped over to a shelf and picked up a bottle.

“I mean, all of my siblin’s are always talkin’ about this plane of existence! And I even get to one up them by bein’ able to breath! Ooh! Do ya think I could even bleed? Oh! Oh! Maybe even die!” With Eyes filled with eagerness, the goat spun around to stare at Alder.

With another zip, the goat ran over and aggressively shook Alder’s hand. “Thanks so much for summonin’ me! Oh I can do and see so much here-! The air’s absolutely filled with magick-!”

Alder vibrated in place, the aggressive hand shaking causing him to bounce up and down. The force of the shaking caused the rune in his hand to loosen, and with a startling crack, it hit the stone floor under them.

The goat didn’t even wait a minute, dropping Alder’s hand to grab the failed rune. “Oooh! What’s this!”

It took a moment to shake off the shaking, a moment too long, as Alder saw the goat’s eyes narrow.

“Heeey.. This is a Controller rune! Did ya try to bind me to ya or somethin’?!” With a small scowl, the chaos demon started to over dramatically look over his body.

“There’s the offerin’ rune, and it’s connected with a linkin’ rune. That means-“ he paused briefly to pull his own horn off- “Here’s the linkin’ rune, bindin’ rune, the no removal rune, I should put this back on, even the stealin’ rune- but..” Seemingly oblivious to Alder’s shock, he popped his horn back on.

“Ya forgot the LTC rune!” With a wide smirk he peered up at the wizard. “Ooh! Yer a special kind of idiot, arentcha?”

Alder gaped, his mouth opening and closing.

“Come on, buddy! Yer gonna catch a fly!” Somehow teleporting up to his side, the chaos demon closed Alder’s mouth.

The wizard in training sputtered as the goat teleported back. “W-Wait you have the-the no chaos rune-!”

The chaos goat immediately chuckled. “Nu-uh! I gotta Resist Chaos! Ya didn’t trap all of my shenanigans! Only trapped ‘em when the plot demands it!”

“Pl-plot-?”

“Pah! Don’t worry about it kid!” The goat shook his head, tapping his hooves against the floor.

“…Mmm… Ya did try to trap me, so I guess I should be goin’. I don’t really wanna be trapped under an idiots thumb.”

Trapped- At the word, Alder’s brain seemed to reboot. “W-Wait-! You can’t leave- you’re a gift to the Archmage-!”

The goat scoffed, “An Archmage? Bah! I don’ wanna work under a stuffy ol’ man! Thanks for the offering though-!” And with that, he lifted his leg up into an over exaggerated running pose.

“It was nice to meet ya! But I got an entire world to see!” And with that, and a puff of a goat shaped gust, the goat vanished from infront of Alder.

The wizard in training stood there for a moment. Then two. Then three-

Before slumping forward.

“…Gods, the Archmage is going to kill me..”

Russia playlist

Gorbachov! Tear down that wall.......and turn up this Russia playlist! The Cossacks are dancing to this one and the yaks are singing. Russia, Siberia, Moscow, St Petersburg and a cold war. It’s all here in this Russia playlist. Hit play: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC18F7oDKY8zH1IOplzHM05MY

We begin the journey in Siberia and make our way across Genghis Khan territory towards Omsk and beyond. We have a look at Chernobyl, Ukraine for a look around and make our way up to Moscow, We finish up this playlist in St Petersburg. Hope you enjoy it.

RUSSIA

001 FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE 007 OST - Main theme 002 Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train 003 The Beatles - Back in The USSR 004 Iron Maiden - Mother Russia 005 Sisters of Mercy  - Dominion / Mother Russia 006 Ramones - Cretin Hop 007 Sting - Russians 008 Russkaja - Peace, Love & Russian Roll 009 Robert Simon Thomas - Troika  (balalaika) 010 Jello Biafra, The Guantanamo School Of Medicine - We Created Putin 011 The Cult -  Siberia 012 Mastodon -  Siberian Divide 013 Yes - Siberian Khatru 014 Pesnokhorki Barnaul - Cossacks songs of Siberia 015 Diablo Swing Orchestra - Siberian Love Affairs 016 The Kills - Siberian Nights 017 The Night Flight Orchestra - Siberian Queen 018 Altai Kai - Traditional Siberian music 019 Vallenfyre -  My Black Siberia 020 Skyhooks - Jukebox In Siberia 021 MISERY INDEX - Siberian March 022 Wooly Mammoth - Mammoth Bones 023 Grumbling Fur -  Siberian Priest 024 Iron Maiden - Genghis Khan 025 Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Night enchanted 026 The Locust -  Live From The Russian Compound 027 ACCEPT - Russian Roulette 028 Cavalera Conspiracy - Genghis Khan 029 Diaframma - Siberia 030 Renaissance - Mother Russia 031 Echo & The Bunnymen - Siberia 032 Dschinghis Khan - Genghis Khan 033 Bad News -  Warriors Of Ghengis Khan 034 The Hu - The great Chinggis Khan 035 Shah - Escape 036 Ray Stevens - Surfin USSR 037 Ramones - Locket Love 038 Heirs -  Russia 039 The Dillinger Escape Plan - Hero of the Soviet Union 040 Natalia Albychakova - Takhpakh 041 Svetlanas - Go Fck You Self 042 Maloletka - Irkutsk Path 043  Kuban Cossack Choir - The hat all around 044 The Lords of the New Church - Russian Roulette 045 Paul Lay Trio - Irkutsk 046 Elvis Hitler - Rocking Over Russia 047 Russian Circles - 309 048 Thylacine - Irkutsk 049 Valeriy Voloshin and gruppa Pyatiletka - Irkutsk 050 DEVO -  Cold War 051 Güiro Meets Russia - It's Not The World, It's You 052 Powerwolf - Nightside of Siberia 053 Altai Kai - Oilo oilo altai 054 Arkona - Yarilo 055 Depeche Mode - People Are People 056 Gorky Park - Bang 057 Igor Stravinsky -  The Rite of Spring, Part 1- 3 Game of Abduction 058 Martika - Toy Soldiers 059 Transvision vamp    - revolution baby 060 The Stranglers -  No More Heroes 061 Gari Gari - Russian gypsy  music 062 Russian Sailors - Dance Yablochka 063 Manic Street Preachers - Revolt 064 Elton John - Nikita 065 Krokus - Russian winter 066 Prince - Ronnie Talk to Russia 067 Soviet SOunds - Baikal-Amur Railroad 068 Genesis - Land of Confusion 069 Duran Duran - Planet Earth 070 Today Is The Day -  The Russian Porn Ballet 071 Nytt Land - Ballad of Gjallarhorn 072 Rotting Christ - Ветры злые - (featuring Irina Zybina) 073 Metallica - Blackened 074 Anneke van Giersbergen, Árstíðir -  Russian Lullaby 075 Der Kommissar - After the Fire 076 Czas relaksu - Andrzej i Eliza 077 korobushka - Folk Russian 078 Peter Gabriel - Red Rain 079 FEAR - Bomb the Russians 080 Rush - Heresy 081 RUSSKAJA - Energia 082 Megadeth -  Peace Sells 083 King Crimson - One More Red Nightmare 084 Sodom - Nuclear Winter 085 Bruce Cockburn - If I Had A Rocket Launcher 086 Talisman - Hey you Horses! 087 Styx - Cold War 088 Grateful Dead - Throwing Stones 089 Gimines - Kai armonika tyliai užgros 090 EXHUMED - Coins Upon the Eyes 091 Mastodon -  The Czar 092 CCCP - American Soviets 093 Sapce Rockit - Supersonik Elektronik 094 Septic Flesh - The Eldest Cosmonaut 095 Quicksand -  Cosmonauts 096 Arkona - Zimushka 097 Abracadabra - Damned Dances 098 Pink Floyd - Two Suns In The Sunset 099 Prince - 1999 100 Trololo Guy - Sean Sell Duck with Fake Subtitles ( Buffalax Style ) 101 Armonika - Gromatele Parašiau 102 Diablo Swing Orchestra - Vodka Inferno 103 Accept -  Balls to the wall 104 Killing Joke - New Cold War 105 UB40 - The Earth Dies Screaming 106 RAMONES - Bonzo Goes To Bitburg (My Brain Is Hanging Upside) 107 TCHAYOK - Zavarka - Mi-minable 108 COH - Soii Noir 109 Vircator - Tunguska 110 Scorpions -  China White 111 Tears For Fears  - Everybody Wants To Rule The World 112 The Stalin - 解剖室 113 KAIRA - OХ РA 114 Alexander Robotnick - Ce n'est q'un début 115 Tunguska Electronic Music Society - Alpha Kawu 116 Arkona - Odna 117  Cist - Antisceptic 118 Sabaton -  Nuclear Attack 119 Leningrad Cowboys - Katjusha 120 PRONG - Rude Awakening 121 Imperial Age - And I Shall Find My Home 122 Так - пела метель 123 Fear Konstruktor - Nonexistence 124 Oneohtrix - Russian Mind 125 Police - Every Breath You Take 126 dEpEchE modE - Two Minute Warning 127 Ultravox - Dancing With Tears In My Eyes 128 Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 129 Metallica - Fight Fire With Fire 130 David Bowie - Heroes 131 woven hand - my Russia 132 Survivor - Burning Heart (Rocky IV OST) 133 Forest - As a Shade Above This Land 134 Tesla - Modern Day Cowboy 135 Colossus Form - Son Of Nature 136 The Flying Lizards - Russia 137 Djivan Gasparyan - A Cool Wind Is Blowing 138 Iron Driver (feat. Pasha Mrachek) - Prisoner of time 139 Pussy Riot - CHAIKA 140 Boris Alexandrov - Катюша (Katyusha) 141 DEVO - Going Under 142 Motor - Yak 143 Nuclear Assault - Nuclear War 144 Edward Artemiev - Station (Solaris OST) 145 Soviet Valves - Puritan Blues 146 Verasy - Polet 147 FAVALLI - Yuri Gagarin 148 Wolfmother - Cosmonaut 149 Yuri Gagarin  - Psychological Discontinuity 150 Witchfinder General - Soviet Invasion 151 Korrozia Metallah - Russian Vodka 152 Russkaja - Kosmopolit 153 Dio -  Gypsy 154 The The - slow train to dawn 155  Blues Pills -  Gypsy 156 Rush - Red Lenses 157 Corey Hart - Komrade Kiev 158 Master - Metal Doctor 159 Howlin Rain - Phantom In The Valley 160 ARKONA - Liki Bessmertnykh Bogov 161 Pitchblack - IHATEU 162 Ozzy Osbourne - Killer of Giants 163 Scorpions - Wind of Change 164 Yat kha - Chorumal Bodum 165 Nadezhda Babkina, Russkaja Pesnja 166 Ramones - Here Today, Gone Tomorrow 167 Russian radio - red flag 168 Manicure - Atomic Summer 169 The Dillinger Escape Plan -  The Threat Posed By Nuclear Weapons 170 Love Among Freaks - Berserker 171 ARIA - HERO OF ASPHALT 172 Temnozor - Fatherland 173 Walknut - Motherland Ostenvegr 174 Weird Al Yankovic - Now That's What I Call Polka! 175 Underworld - Underneath the Radar 176 Skyclad - Polkageist 177 Helloween - Russian Roulé 178 John Coltrane - Russian Lullaby 179 Julian Cope - russian revolution blues 180 Rodrigo y Gabriela - The Russian Messenger 181 Kate Bush - Babooshka 182 ВИА - Чаривни гитары 183 Mastodon - The Last Baron 184 Hovert – Omyt 185 Minsk -  Consumed by Horizons 186 Kypck - Stalingrad 187 Def Leppard -  Gods of war 188 Black Country Communion  - Big Train 189 Sabaton -  Stalingrad 190  Doomsquad - Russian Gaze 191 Soviet Soviet - Human Nature 192 Murray head    - one night in bangkok 193 The Korgis - Young n Russian 194 Chelsea Light Moving - Communist Eyes 195 Helix - Champagne Communist 196 UDO - Train Ride In Russia 197 Mr Weebl - Russian Dancing Men 198 Jamie Jones   - Siberian Express 199 They Might Be Giants - Sold My Mind to the Kremlin 200 Ed Khuild - lolololololololol 201 Sepultura - Itsari 202 Vy Pole - Enormous 203 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow 204 Gogol Bordello -  Gypsy Auto Pilot 205 Buffalex - Horse Eat My Nipple 206 Municipal Waste - Wolves of Chernobyl 207 Drudkh -  Cursed Sons II 208 Chernobyl - A song for the fallen 209 Russkaja - Hometown Polka 210 Toxic Holocaust -  Out of the Fire 211  Hail Caesar! Soundtrack - 19 Soviet Man 212 The Blow Monkeys  - The Man From Russia 213 The Devil's Blood - The Anti-Kosmik Magick 214 Orchid - Cosmonaut of Three 215 Vergeltung - Cold War 216 KYPCK - Alleya Stalina 217 Cabaret Voltaire -  Calling Moscow 218 Red Army Choir - Polyushka Polye 219 Iron Curtain - Ready To Strike 220 Porcupine Tree - Russia on Ice 221 Sigue Sigue Sputnik - 21st Century Boy 222 Al Stewart - Roads to Moscow 223 The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil 224 Soviet Soviet - ecastacy 225 KREMLIN - Will You Feed Me 226 AC/DC - Heatseeker 227 ANJ - Gorbachev 228 Katyusha (Катюша) - Aleksandr Marshal & Valeria Kurnushkina 229 ARKONA - Stenka Na Stenku 230 Black Obelisk -  The wall 231 Skyclad - Catherine at the Wheel 232 Pussy Riot - Kropotkin-vodka (Kill the sexist!) 233 Brian Eno -- Stedelijk 234 Zola Jesus - Siphon 235 Insect Inside - The First Shining of New Genus 236 MR. ZIVAGO - Little Russian 237 The Real McKenzies - Midnight Train to Moscow 238 Red Army OST - KGB 239 The Toasters - Night Train to Moscow 240 Thy Catafalque - Urania 241 The Apogee - Hieronymus Bosch 242 Sabaton - Panzerkampf 244 RUSSKAJA - Barada   245 Oneohtrix Point Never - KGB Nights 246 Faith No More -  A Small Victory 247 Mike and the mechanics - A Call To Arms 248 Michael Jackson - Stranger In Moscow 249 Blondie - Contact In Red Square 250 Rammstein - Moskau 251 Pseudogod - deathwomb 252 KGB - Subway Sleepwalker 253 Igor Butman Big Band - Moscow at 3am 254 Genghis Khan - Moscow 255 Demon - Blue Skies In Red Square 256 Type O Negative - The Profit of Doom 257 COH - Red Square 258 Cougars - Red Square 259 Ray Conniff - Moscow Nights 260 INDIANS IN MOSCOW - Indians in Moscow 261 Radio Moscow - 250 Miles 262 Kingdom Come - Crown of Moscow 263 Powerwolf - Moscow after dark 264 U.D.O. - Decadent 265 System Of A Down - Störagéd 266 Closure In Moscow - Pink Lemonade 267 VIBRATORS - DISCO IN MOSCO 268 IRA PETROWA - MOSKAUER NÄCHTE 269 Visage - Moon Over Moscow 270 Farmers Market - Red Square Dance 271 Wonderland -  Moscow 272 Courtney Pine - Red Square Gagarinesk 273 Stray Cats - Storm The Embassy 274 German Shepherds - Communist Control 275 Moloko - Radio Moscow 276 March of the defenders - Moscow 277 Takako Nishizaki - Podmoskovnye vechera( Moscow Nights) 278 Simple Minds - Moscow Underground 279 The Spotnicks - Moscow 280 The Russian Jazz Quartet - Journey from Moscow 281 Bob Crewe Generation - Miniskirts In Moscow 282 MODERN TROUBLE - FLY TO MOSCOW 283 Gorky Park - Moscow Calling 284 BB Gabor - Moscow Drug Club 285 Doe Maar - De bom 286 Manicured noise - Moscow 287 Russkaja - Ras Dwa Tri 288 PLANET P PROJECT - Armageddon 289 Clan of Xymox - Muscoviet Musquito 290 Gogol Bordello -  60 REVOLUTIONS 291 Uriah Heep   - Gypsy 292 Living Colour - Cult Of Personality 293 The Hollies - Russian Roulette 294 Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen - Red Square 295 Frank Chacksfield - Under Moscow Skies 296 Thomas Dolby - Eastern Bloc 297 The Redskins - Kick Over The Statues 298 The Alchemist - Moscow Mornings - Sunrise 299 N.O.T.A. - Moscow 300 Svetlanas - Where Is My Borscht? 301 Against Me! - Russian Spies 302 James Horner - Gorkij park (Gorky Park 1983) OST 303 Hetalia Russia - Moscú 304 Roberto Jacketti & The Scooters - Moscow Nights 305 Ram J Holder - The Blues in Moscow 306 Ivan Rebroff sings Russian folk songs - Moscow nights 307 Jethro Tull - Crest Of A Knave Said She Was a Dancer 308 Men At Work - Its a Mistake 309 Skeewiff - Moscow Mule 310 The Clash - Ivan Meets G.I. Joe 311 Captain Sensible - Glad its all over 312 Ulfdallir - Steel Armor 313 Arkona - Oi Ti ne Vecher (Oh Not That Evening) 314 Lena Katina - No Voy A Olvidarte 315 JOHNNY M5 - Moscow Nights 316   Eddy Huntington - U.S.S.R. 317 Selsius - Moscow 318 WINTERUS - MOSCOW 319 Mr. Zivago - Love in Moscow 320 Brutto - Moscow Calling 321 Udo Lindenberg - Moskau 322 Aliza Kashi - Moscow Nights 323 Angelic Upstarts - Last Tango In Moscow 324 ASIA - Russian Dolls 325 Blaze Bayley & Thomas Zwijsen - Russian Holiday 326 Kate Bush - Breathing 327 Roger Waters and David Bowie - When the wind blows 328 Roky Erickson & The Aliens - Sputnik 329 Moscow - Orange Juice 330 Ivan Rebroff - Cossack Patrol 331 Alexandr Gradsky - Как молоды мы были 332 James Horner - Gorky Park - Following KGB 333 B.T.R - Moscow City 334 Gogol Bordello -  Hats Off To Kolpakoff 335 CCCP - Sputnik [Cosmos] 336 Russkaja - Go Sputnik 337 Red Spektor - Cosmonaut 338 Bald Red Lady - Cosmonaut 339 Ulver - Russian Doll 340 Hawkwind - Sputnik Stan 341 Bad Acid Trip - Putin Fears Pussy 342 Queensryche - Operation Mindcrime 343 Dark Tranquillity -  Arkhangelsk 344 TOTAL REJECTS (This Night) I'm Going To Be Destroyed 345 Manic Street Preachers - The Next Jet to Leave Moscow 346 Billy Joel - Leningrad 347 Victor Smolski    - The Heretic 348 Boney M - Rasputin 349 Type O Negative - Tripping A Blind Man 350 Leningrad Cowboys - Leningrad 351 Accept - Stalingrad 352 Russian Folk Music - Russian Winter 353 Cavalera Conspiracy -  Rasputin 354 Kontrust - Rasputin 355 Bersarin Quartett - St. Petersburg 356 Folkearth - From Volga to Bosphorus 357 Anastasia - Rumor in St. Petersburg 358 Retox - Soviet Reunion 359 Fireside - Let Rasputin Do It 360 Mastodon - Oblivion 361 St.Petersburg Ska Jazz Review - Volga River Boat Man 362 THERION - The Khlysti Evangelist 363 The Mountain Goats - Evening in Stalingrad 364 Rage - Soul Survivor 365 Indigo Girls - Closer to Fine 366 ARKONA - Slavsia Rus 367 Russian Folk Music - Kalinka (balalaika) 368 Catch 22 - The Decembrists Song 369 Joanna Stingray - City of Lenin 370 Aria - Attila 371 KAUAN  - Khurum 372 Balalaika Ensemble Wolga - Cossacks Dance 373 The Liminanas - Russian Roulette 374 Vasiliy Shumov - Porridge 375 U.D.O. - I GIVE AS GOOD AS I GET 666 Russkaja - Change

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC18F7oDKY8zH1IOplzHM05MY

Mei 美美 Qin – Character Sheet

it’s like everything you say is a sweet revelation / all i wanna do is get into your head / yeah we could stay alone, you and me and this temptation / sipping on your lips, hanging on by a thread, baby

late night watching television / but how’d we get in this position / it’s way too soon, i know this isn’t love (no) / but i need to tell you something

i really really really really really really like you / and i want you, do you want me, do you want me too?

Archetype — The Explorer Birthday — July 9th, 2002 Zodiac Sign — Year of the Horse, Rising Leo, Sun in Cancer, Moon in Cancer MBTI — ENFP Enneagram — 2, the Helper Temperament — Sanguine Hogwarts House — Gryffindor Moral Alignment — Chaotic Good Primary Vice — Lust Primary Virtue — Charity Element — Water/Fire (she’s a Water Horse, so she definitely identifies with that but in Western tradition she is Fire.)

Overview:

Mother — Tanya Qin Father — Peng Qin Mother’s Occupation — Editor-in-Chief of the San Francisco Chronicle Father’s Occupation — financial diviner Family Finances — wealthy Birth Order — middle Brothers —  none Sisters — Ting-Ting (Gemma Chan, May 13, 1993), Su (January 22, 2003) Other Close Family — close to their mother’s side, father’s side lives in China, but they’ve taken trips to see them once or twice. do not have any cousins/aunts/uncles, but close to their grandparents. Best Friend — Daisy Zanetti, they grew up together. Met in school and were thick as thieves right away. Daisy is a half-fairy, so they both understood the whole “half” background thing. Other Friends — Lots and lots of friends~ Enemies — There was probably like one Mean Girl that Mei was always antagonizing and who was always antagonizing her. Pets — None. Home Life During Childhood — Relatively happy. Has nice, loving parents. Did a lot of Family Activities, since that was important. Mother was busy a lot with work, but her father was around a lot and Ting-Ting was always around (until she went to school.) Town or City Name(s) — San Francisco, CA What Did His or Her Bedroom Look Like — Posters everywhere! Very personalized and customized. Lots of reds and golds. Probably had like one of those net things around her bed. Always very messy, because Mei starts a project and then just jumps to the next. Lots of natural light too probably. Any Sports or Clubs — Dance and Gymnastics. Mei has kept up with both of these throughout the year. Does both ballet and hip hop. Her favorite gymnastics is rhythmics. Favorite Toy or Game — She wouldn’t consider it a toy or game, of course, but loves doing tarot and tea readings. Also enjoys a good board game, is very competitive though. Schooling — Public school. Favorite Subject — Physical Education ?? Maybe literature. Art classes… Popular or Loner — Decently popular. She wasn’t one of the people that everyone knew but she had a wide circle of friends. Important Experiences or Events — Discovering she had divination skills. Deciding her specialization. Moving to Swynlake! Nationality — American Culture — Chinese-American Religion and beliefs — Spiritual, borrowing from a spread of Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese folklore, and Confucianism.

Physical Appearance:

Face Claim — Cheng Xiao Complexion — Fair-skinned Hair Colour — Naturally a dark brown, but she dyes it a lot! Eye Colour — Dark brown. Height — 5’6 Build — Athletic, but slim. Tattoos — None. Piercings — Ears. Common Hairstyle — Likes to braid it or put it in two buns. Does a lot of half-up/half-down hairstyles. Clothing Style — Chic and trendy, lots of colors and patterns. Mannerisms — Very bouncy, doesn’t sit still much. Twirls her hair around her finger a lot. Usual Expression —

Health:

Overall (do they get sick easily)? — Pretty healthy! I’m sure this is due to Ting-Ting constantly balancing her Yin-Yang Physical Ailments — None. Neurological Conditions — None. Allergies — None! Grooming Habits — Rather good. Takes a lot of care with her appearance. Always makes sure to moisturize and exfoliate and change out of sweaty clothes. Sleeping Habits — Average. Eating Habits — Eats a lot because Su is constantly making things, but can forget meals if she is distracted or concentrating. Exercise Habits —  Exercises a lot! Does all sorts of things like pilates and swimming and jogging. Emotional Stability — I give her a 7/10, she loses points for being a stubborn, unreasonable teenager and for her temper, but otherwise is pretty even-keeled. Body Temperature — Average. Sociability — Very social! Loves surrounding herself with people. Addictions — Love? Drug Use — None, we will see. Alcohol Use — Has gone to parties where she’s drank before, but not often.

Your Character’s Character:

Bad Habits — Interrupting people, bouncing from topic to topic, meddling in things that she shouldn’t, talking back, being a general nuisance. Good Habits — Very kind, very caring. Wants to take care of all her people. Strong moral compass. Best Characteristic — Her certainty. Worst Characteristic — Her stubbornness. Worst Memory — Being told she would have to move to Swynlake. Best Memory — When her father told her that he was proud of her for completing her studies for being a sorcerer and accepting an apprenticeship. Proud of — Her magic, her family history, her looks, her sporting ability. Embarrassed by — Not much, probably the fact she isn’t very good at school. Driving Style — Probably was just learning how to drive. A speed demon, but surprisingly a good driver. Strong Points — Her moral center and her big heart. Temperament — Can be explosive, but general soft and sweet. Attitude — Generally positive. Weakness — Not knowing what she wants. Fears — Not knowing what she’s going to do with her life. Phobias — Anything unlucky, though I wouldn’t call it a phobia, more of a cautious regard. Secrets — None really? She doesn’t keep much from people. She’s very “This Is Who I am. Fight Me.” Regrets — Having to leave Swynlake. Feels Vulnerable When — People are angry or upset with her, she’s not following her heart. Pet Peeves — Being told she’s wrong, lol. Conflicts — Duty to Family v Duty to Heart Motivation — Following her heart. Short Term Goals and Hopes — Make friends and something out of her life in Swynlake. Long Term Goals and Hopes — Figure out what she wants to do with her life. Sexuality — As-is she is straight, but this can change. Day or Night Person — Day Introvert or Extrovert — Extrovert. Optimist or Pessimist — Optimist except she can be really sour when things don’t go her way.

Likes and Styles:

Music — Oh, gosh–where to start? Mei loves love songs, of course. Big fan of Elton John, Elvis Presley, Celine Dion, etc etc. She also loves modern stuff, of course. Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Ed Sheeran…if she’s really feeling it some Florence and the Machine. Loves KPop too. I’ll let Lauryl tell me who she stans. (Is that the phrase I feel like there is a phrase.) Anyway, anything that is love related, she’ll give it a listen. Books — Doesn’t actually like reading that much, tbh. Doesn’t hold her interest. Magazines — Do people read magazines anymore? Does Buzzfeed count as a magazine? Probably giggles over Cosmopolitan. Foods — Sweets! Chocolate is her favorite, but she likes licorice a lot too. Is one of those weird people that likes black licorice. Also, loves a good rice pudding. That’s probably her favorite dessert. She also loves chicken, any kind of chicken–she doesn’t care what you put it in or what you put on it. Isn’t much of a picky eater. Actually really enjoys being adventurous with her food. Drinks — Green tea, green tea, green tea! Mei loves tea, especially iced. She also surprisingly likes salt soda water–she goes back and forth on sweet and savory. Sometimes, she just really wants salt soda water because it is just crisp and refreshing and wakes her back-up and reorients her yin-yang when she needs it. Animals — Elephants! Mei loves elephants. She’s that girl that has like elephant shirts and an elephant backpack and an elephant stuffed animal probably. They have such a high emotional capacity and Mei really respects them for this. They are also just so cute with their floppy ears and their soft, sweet eyes! Loves birds too as most of them are symbols of good luck and good tidings–besides owls, which are harbingers of death. Sports — Gymnastics and dance. Social Issues — Magick Rights is the biggest one. Also feminism. Also all the “main” issues. Favorite Saying — “Better to light a candle, than to curse the darkness” - Chinese Proverb Color — Golds, yellows, reds, blues are her favourites. She loves gold because it is a Classy color. Most of her jewelry is gold. She loves yellow because it is bright and happy! Red is lucky in Chinese culture and it always reminds her of times like New Year’s! Also, it is the color of passion and love. Blues she likes because they are calming and gentle.  These are her lucky colors. She also loves pink, even though it is technically a color that she should avoid. Really hates white, because she doesn’t like what a blank slate it is. Also, hates brown because it is an icky boring color. As you can see, she has a lot of Opinions on colors. Clothing —Chic and trendy, lots of colors and patterns. Jewelry — Loves it! Wears mostly gold. Probably has a few staple pieces but then exchanges things depending on her mood. Websites — Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter etc etc TV Shows — CW shows and K/Cdramas Movies — All the great love classics: Gone with the Wind, the Titanic, When Harry Met Sally, Roman Holiday, all of Audrey Hepburn probably, the Notebook, Singing in the Rain…I could go on and on. She loves movies that tug at the heart strings and are full of that wild, amazing, passionate kind of love. They always make her swoon and if she is choosing a movie for movie night, you know it’s gonna be a romantic tearjerker. Though, she also likes romcoms. Doesn’t like action movies or horror movies or anything too intense, they freak her out Greatest Want — To figure out what to do with her life. Greatest Need — To grow up and learn things aren’t all about her, lmao.

Where and How Does Your Character Live Now:

Home — A three bedroom apartment with Ting-Ting and Su. Household furnishings — Rather plain at the moment, but will probably grow cozy as they settle in. Favorite Possession — Her pseudogrimoire where she writes down all the signs and stuff that she sees and puzzles out the meaning to. Most Cherished Possession — Her wand, which is a fan that was her mother’s, her mother gave it to her and her father and Ting-Ting help her imbibe it with magic. Neighborhood — Tortuga Place Married Before — No Significant Other Before — Non-serious boyfriends and Serious crushes Children — She iS a child Relationship with Family — Very close with her dad, even though he’s always yelling at her and being disappointed in her. They have a lot in common and she loves him. Her and her mother also get along more or less, she’s less stringent than her dad. Ting-Ting and her probably have the most contentious relationship, but even that hasn’t been that bad really. Mostly Mei being a nosy, annoying little sister. It will get more intense now that Ting-Ting is the authority figure and Mei is pissed about their situation. Su and Mei get along more or less well, they annoy each other, as sisters are wont to do, but Mei would def consider Su one of her best friends. Car — None. Career — Student Dream Career — She doesn’t know !! Dream Life — Married, with children, though she doesn’t know what she wants out of a career. Love Life — Nonexistant, which pisses her off. Talents or Skills — Excellent gymnast and very good with her magic. Intelligence Level — Decently intelligent, has street smarts, tbh. Very sharp in conversation. Finances — Wealthy

Weekly Fic Rec

Yoonkook

take my hands now by mintea G | 3.8k | AU |  Part 3 of the heart of a storm series |  Three times Jeongguk and Yoongi held hands, and a familiar memory from a different perspective.

inevitable by darling NR | 3.4k | AU | what's a ring except a circle that leads me back to you?

Break My Stride by Solastia E | 14.3k | AU | Yoongi is an Omega that has managed to escape the annual mating run without an Alpha for seven years in a row. He has no plans for that to change, but he’s unaware of his latest opponent: the newly presented Alpha Jeon Jungkook, his very determined childhood friend.

Namkook

why stop now by candoura M | 4k | AU | Namjoon loves his baby, but sometimes things get a little out of hand when two idiots share the scarce common sense of one.

Your quiet afternoon crush by Aguacates G | 6.1k | AU | Someday, Jeongguk thinks. Someday he’ll say it, and Namjoon will hear what he means. (Five times Jeongguk tells Namjoon how he feels, plus one time he doesn't have to.)

end of summer by heyobsessions E | 1.4k | AU |sunlight, sweet and rosy, spilled in through the blinds, fuzzy streaks of yellow-pink, staining their bedsheets. tangled limbs, sticky with sweat and stillness, jeongguk’s head on namjoon’s chest.

Shine on, diamond by Aguacates T | 6.9k | AU | It was just a matter of being too close, wasn’t it? Maybe it’s always been just a matter of being too close. (Jeongguk and Namjoon get drunk and make out, and it's kind of a disaster.)

bees, knees and emotional crises by dygonilly T | 20k | AU | (or, Jungkook and Namjoon meet at the weekly farmer's market where Namjoon sells honey that he makes himself, and Jungkook has a crush the size of Pangea and also cries about bees a few times because they're important, damn it)

why don't you fry my circuits, baby (i want to see the stars) by yxxnjing M | 5k | AU | “Hyung.” “Jungkook.” “I want to have sex with you.” “O-Okay.” “Your schedule is free for Friday. Let’s have sex on Friday.” In which there are a lot of firsts in the life of an android, and Namjoon finds himself helping Jungkook through possibly one of the most important ones yet.

Honey Honey Thighs by hapakitsune E | 3.5k | Canon | Jungkook offers to help Namjoon out with his sore legs.

A++ by dygonilly T | 2k | AU | for the prompt: ‘hey we hooked up last night and it turns out you’re my child’s teacher’

you're my moonlight by ameliabedelias T | 3.5k | AU | The problem isn’t that Jeongguk might not be magickal. The problem isn’t even that Jeongguk potentially lied about being magickal so as to gain employment.The problem is that Jeongguk is cute. // Or, Namjoon runs a magickal coffeeshop & bookstore and Jeongguk needs a job.

Namgikook

vanilla, chocolate, honey by hammersandstrings G | 24.9k | Namjoon has come by the bakery more than a few times over the few weeks since they first met, with the flimsy excuse that their frankly very basic coffee is good enough to walk five minutes off of his usual path, but mostly to lean over the counter during slow hours and talk to whoever’s around before he has to either leave for work, pick his son up from school, or head home to start dinner. To flirt, really—he’s about as subtle as a summer storm with it, but Yoongi doesn’t mind it. Isn’t sure which of them he’s flirting with sometimes, or both, but likes it just the same. (In which Jeongguk loves easily, Yoongi loves quietly, and Namjoon is love embodied.)

a feel so sweet by ameliabedelias M | 17.3k | AU | In which Namjoon, Yoongi & Jeongguk are in love, the world is generally not made for things that come in threes, and they find a way to make it work anyhow.

Hopekook

golden baby by notyoongs G | 8.2k | AU | jeongguk stares down at where beomgyu is chewing on a toy in the middle of the living room. his babysitter bailing on him isn’t the worst thing to happen, and he could just stay here, but—they’re supposed to be heading to a showcase with their dances next week, and jeongguk can’t possibly miss this dance practice. hoseok would have his head, not to mention everyone else. but he also doesn’t have a babysitter for beomgyu, and he can’t leave beomgyu on his own. jeongguk closes his eyes, panic rising in his throat like bile when he realizes there’s only one option: he has to bring beomgyu with him to dance practice. (or: jeongguk has a big gay crush on hoseok. he also has a baby. hoseok knows about only one of these things.)

we just dance backwards into each other by dygonilly M | 7.5k | AU | 5 times Hoseok and Jungkook pretended they were dating, and 1 time they didn’t.

Jikook

Misunderstandings on Ice by NaHe T | 2.3k | AU | In which the cute barista Jimin has been crushing on has no idea Jimin is an Olympic figure skater and asks him out on an ice skating date.

interlude: dream, reality by notyoongs E | 5.1k | Canon | with a thinly veiled moan, hips bucking against jeongguk’s thigh, jimin realizes he needs jeongguk to fuck him. except—he’s still asleep. all at once, jimin feels another flash of heat go through him, not just at the idea of jeongguk fucking him in a hotel room in los angeles with their bandmates on either side of these walls, lazy morning sex melting into something more, but—the idea of jeongguk doing all that while he’s still sleeping.

lesson learned by NaHe M | 2k | Canon | Jungkook never loses, but when it comes to Jimin, it’s always a different story. Or: Jungkook withholds sex and kisses as a punishment but it is him who ends up caving in.

take me home by NaHe M | 2.1k | AU | Officer Jeon gets dispatched to a night club where there had been a reported disturbance. When he arrives at the club he finds his drunken boyfriend causing a scene.

Jinkook 

bunny ears by goldenhearts T | 11.8k | AU | Jungkook is a talented potion maker but his latest experiment keeps changing him into a rabbit. Unfortunately, his rival Seokjin is the only one with enough knowledge about potions to help him.

what’s yours is mine, mine, mine by jeonthebun NR | 2k | AU | jungkook is always stealing seokjin’s clothes, but he can’t find it in himself to really mind that much.soft magic au ft. boyfriends jinkook + library shenanigans

come here often? by dygonilly T | 3.5k | AU | “I’m Seokjin,” he announces. “Oh,” the guy blinks. “I’m Jungkook?” “You sound surprised about that.” “Sorry I’m just not used to ho—guys. People. Talking to me here.” (or, Seokjin and Jungkook meet in the waiting room of the Emergency Department)

Yoonjin

this could be the start of something new by honeyboyyoongi G | 5.3k | AU | Getting the lead in the winter musical is part of Seokjin’s twelve step plan to woo student accompanist/local cryptid Yoongi and he’s not letting anything, not even Jungkook and Namjoon’s Disney romance, get in the way. a high school musical au

hold the press, I wanna get off with you by finedae T | 4.3k | AU | Seokjin's an idol, visual and vocal of popular boy group BTS. Yoongi's a hip-hop artist and producer. They're not supposed to be together, except when they are--hands all over each other when they show up at underground parties, the new hot 'couple' except--they're not together together, of course not. that would be ridiculous. like the way Yoongi sometimes looks at him, like he's the missing lyric that he's been working on. or how Seokjin's ideal type of "short, pretty, ambitious" doesn't refer to any female or idol in the industry. no, that would definitely be ridiculous. '"I don't think your friends like me very much," Seokjin concludes after the seventh snide remark about being an idol or a trophy boyfriend or winning trophies that don't matter or maybe something about idols fucking trophies, he's lost count after his third soju. The MCountdown trophy is perfectly spherical on top, so Seokjin's not sure how anyone could fuck it, really.'

watermelon by 55cancrie E | 5.2k | AU | On a hot summer day, Yoongi and Seokjin get off together.

pomegranate by 55cancrie T | 3.7k | AU | It's the bassist, Yoongi realizes with some shock. And the bassist--he’s the guy from outside, who knocked the lollipop out of his hand, who shoved those candies at him. With the instrument case on his back. He's got a beautiful voice.

Precisely When Somebody Shows You to the Ocean by sinkingmyships M | 21.2k | AU | The longer Yoongi hangs around the tank in the aquarium, the more he thinks that Seokjin is, in fact, a real mermaid. “You’re really real,” he says, keeping his voice neutral. “You’re not acting, are you?” Seokjin smiles, yet it’s the saddest Yoongi has seen him. “I am acting, though. I’m pretending to pretend to be a mermaid.”

Lead Me Towards The Deep End by sinkingmyships G | 2.8k | AU | In the framed photograph in Yoongi's bedroom, Seokjin is sandwiched between Jeongguk and Jimin. Glinting scale, flared flukes, bare skin, a pair of light-wash jeans. A boy and his mermaids. Yoongi still wishes he’d gotten a photo of all of them, with Namjoon and Hoseok and Taehyung too, when they were all in one place, but it hadn’t crossed his mind back then. This time, they’ll all go to the beach together. Or: an epilogue to their whale of a tale.

açaí by 55cancrie T | 3.2k | AU | Yoongi has a love that belongs to the sea, who worries after him with full-hearted love, with trembling fingers, with the longing of oceans.

All the Time in the World by whenflowersbloom M | 1.7k | AU | Seokjin and Yoongi are vampires, extremely soft for each other 24/7.

Namseok

make my heart beat out my chest by morsku E | 7.6k | AU | Hoseok knows he and Namjoon are growing lazy and boring in many aspects of their relationship, but it only starts bothering him when he realizes it's happening to their sex life too.

Taegi

warm haze by brightlight E | 3k | AU | Taehyung doesn't see the point in getting dressed in a heat wave with no power; Yoongi was really just trying to read a book.

A Family Can Be Seven Grown Men and a Pomeranian by minvmin T | 5.8k | AU | “can’t anyone walk around this house at night without hearing sex noises?” -seokjin, probably or, “if taehyung doesnt shut up about yoongi i might kill him or yoongi or myself, whichever comes first." -jimin, definitely or, the ot7/taegi chat fic that no one (but kinda some people) asked for

i think you look cute (can i get your number) by taegiwithluv T | 7.2k | AU | jiminnie <3 OK i got a solution why not you pretend to be yeontan?? u know like how some people use their cats/dogs as their tinder profile u could do that!!! taetae 🌻 oh yeah ur right jiminnie <3 im always right wdym :/ or the one where taehyung makes a tinder page but as yeontan

swipe right;; by heyyyjude  T | 3.9k | AU | “As a single gay man…” Taehyung cleared his throat. “... especially lately it’s been a lot harder to find something more…” He trailed off trying to find the right words to express himself. “Meaningful?” “Yes, more meaningful than just some one night stand or casual hook up.” “So… that brought you to Tinder?” Taehyung smiled over at him slyly, “It brought me to you.” // Or, Taehyung finds Yoongi on tinder and decides to take a chance.

Taekook

75% Sugar, No Ice by orphan_account G | 2.7k | AU | Apparently the new boba shop around the corner does delivery, and Taehyung thinks the guy who does the dropoffs is pretty cute. Also, Jimin’s a shitty wingman and Taehyung sucks at taking cues.

X-Men

Cherik

Order Up by ikeracity G | 4.3k | AU | Charles has a terrible habit of multitasking, and that is probably why he absentmindedly tells the pizza man that he loves him when hanging up. Then the pizza man says it back. And Charles is pretty much smitten from there.

A Milder March- Fluffy Robe/ PJs

From the #A Milder March prompt list:

Fluffy Robe/ PJs

As soon as he was through the door, Steve was pulling off his boots, his harness, his gauntlets and gloves and holsters and all but stripping down in the front hall. 

Loki watched on, amused, until Steve was hopping about, trying to free himself and clearly frustrated by his trappings, and then Loki took pity on him and, with a twitch of his hand, relieved him of all but his underthings. 

Steve straightened, crossing his arms protectively over the thin white material of his undershirt, and Loki allowed his eyes to trail appreciatively over his partner’s frame. 

“Gorgeous.” He murmured. 

Steve wrinkled his nose. 

“I’m gross and sweaty.” He protested, turning as if to squeeze past Loki on his way to their room. 

Loki licked his lips.

“You are,” he agreed. “And also gorgeous. Why don’t you have a shower-- I’ll pull out some clothes for you.” 

Steve gave him a narrow eyed, suspicious look, clearly familiar with Loki’s tendency towards tricks when he got in these moods. But he nodded just the same.

“I’d appreciate that. Thanks.” 

He dropped a kiss on Loki’s cheek and passed him by when Loki stepped to the side to make room. 

Upon emerging from the shower, though, it became clear exactly the sort of trick Loki had had in mind. 

There was a pair of simple lounge pants, soft and cotton-y, and they would be inoffensive, if not for the repeating shield motif printed across them-- interspersed with the outline of Loki’s iconic helm, all on a navy blue field. 

Hardly something he could have found somewhere, which meant Loki had magicked them up himself. 

Steve flushed at the blatant openness of the design. It felt almost vulnerable-- like he’d feel if they decided to lock lips in public. But that was ridiculous-- he was at home. There was no host of who knows how many cameras around. And it wasn’t like he didn’t routinely cuddle up with Loki-- and do more than cuddle, for that matter. He wasn’t ashamed of him. 

Just… private. 

But he was in private, and Loki wanted to see these on him so… Steve did a mental shrug and slipped them on. 

They were cozy, even softer inside than they had been on the outside, and he nearly shivered with surprise at that. 

There was no shirt under it-- but that was hardly a surprise. He suspected Loki went out of his way to find excuses to get Steve to walk around bare chested. 

What was under it, however, was a matching blue fluffy robe. Almost comically plush, and bearing a single mark on the chest, the combined image of Loki’s helm and his shield. 

He struggled less with that, and slipped it on, delighting in the feel of it against the skin of his arms and back. 

He considered tying it shut; there was a means to do so, but he ran warm and he had a feeling Loki was dressing him up only to get him out of it-- an odd, sleepwear version of lingerie. 

When he emerged into their bedroom, he was surprised to find it was empty, but he found Loki in the living room, curled up on the couch in a matching robe and pair of pants, though his were green. 

For all Steve’s misgivings about putting on the printed pants, seeing them on Loki made some possessive part of him do a somersault. 

It looked good on him. Right.

And, judging by the expression on Loki’s face, he felt much the same about Steve. 

“These are nice,” Steve remarked lightly, coming to sit down next to Loki on the couch. Loki shifted to make room for him. 

“I am glad you approve,” Loki murmured, sly, his lips turning up at the corners. “I certainly approve of the way they look on you.” 

He scooted in closed, plastering himself against Steve’s side, his fingers finding the smooth skin of Steve’s chest through the open front of the robe. 

“You should see yourself,” Steve told him, reaching up to smooth his hand over Loki’s hair, and tuck a bit of it behind his ear. “Did you have something in mind that we ought to do in these?”

Loki half shrugged against him.

“You’ve had a long day. I thought we might order food in, and just relax together. Unless you feel like doing something a little more athletic-- though I think that counts as doing something while out of these.” Loki wiggled his brows, and Steve laughed. 

“No-- you’re right, I’m exhausted, and I could use the downtime. There’s something so nice about just… being surrounded by softness.” 

Loki made a face.

“Well, I am hardly soft, Captain. But I am glad of it, just the same. You deserve a break, every now and again.” 

“You’re perfect for me, soft or no.” Steve reassured him. “And this is greatly appreciated. Maybe after we relax a bit, I can show you just how much.” 

“If not, I will accept a rain check.” Loki let him know, and pressed a kiss to Steve’s nose before handing him the remote control-- a gift, when it came to their usual watching habits-- and curled up to cuddle against him. 

Steve turned on a nature documentary, and let his fingers run in little circles over Loki’s robe while he settled in and let the worries of the day wash away.

Despite his hesitance, these Pjs had been a really good idea.

The Dunwich Horror

H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age - since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart - people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason - though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers - is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock".

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old - older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

II.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might - and did - speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man - an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear - though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.

'I dun't keer what folks think - ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin - some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!'

The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Wateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farm-house, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his slattemly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.

It was somewhat after this time - on Hallowe'en - that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop - of the undecayed Bishops - mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterwards he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's black brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace.

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house - a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section - though many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson - a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.

'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old - in September of 1914 - his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore dilligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered - such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly synchronized with bursts of flame - 'them witch Whateleys' doin's' - from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second storey. She would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar told the store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.

Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.

IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.

'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.'

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.

Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows - an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.'

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another sentence or two.

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work... Only them, the old uns as wants to come back...'

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed to have died - but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.

V.

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian - the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

Dr. Annitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind's.

'Mr Armitage,' he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take that book home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it. It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as yew be.' And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth - or at least not of tridimensional earth - rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes - the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'

During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.

VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat - such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterwards - such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three - it is not certain which - shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth ...' They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the courthouse in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always paid their debts has yet been discovered.

It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs Corey.

'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey - they's suthin' ben thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it. An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans - twict or three times as big as any they is - hed of ben paounded dawon into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is around Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...'

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, 'Cha'ncey he just come back a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's house is all bowed up, with timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard, tew - great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.

'An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows, frightened ez he was an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on Whateleys cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the village.

'I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad end he deserved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an' Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich - livin' things - as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

'The graoun' was a-talkin' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heered the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he thought he heered another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley's - a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the matter. He see enough I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.

'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air dawon thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads and meadows between the newmade Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended - or rather, reversed - there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd! ...' and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

VIII.

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet - this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.

Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber's script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.

On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written,he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.

Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday - the next day - he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, 'But what, in God's name, can we do?'

Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.

'Stop them, stop theml' he would shout. 'Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something - it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder... It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate...'

But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's raving.

Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him - the earth threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him.

IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.

'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...'

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambuians in tenebris... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark.

Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.

It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.

'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout - it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!'

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen - opposite side ter this - an' smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush.

'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off - on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill - Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.'

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

'But that ain't the trouble naow - that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill - she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.

'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm bed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse - not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an' then...'

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.

'An' then.... Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in... an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming... jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss...'

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

'That's all - not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.'

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards - well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's invisible - I knew it would be - but there's powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.

'We must follow it - and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way - I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?'

The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's - a leetle t'other side.'

Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan's had been.

'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up - slow-like - creepin' - up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!'

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right - but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

X.

In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud - a cloud about the size of a moderately large building - near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

'Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...'

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...'

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed - yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth ...' rang the hideous croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk... h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh...'

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...'

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.'

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.

'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill...'

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it come from?'

Armitage chose his words very carefully.

'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.'

Comedy of Errors

This is my first fic in years. Be gentle, please! :D

James was three weeks old before they left the house. It wasn’t like they planned it on purpose either. It was just easier to change his nappies at home, to burp and feed him, to keep his explosions in check.

But one day, Ginny just put her foot down. “We need to see the sunlight!” she announced, her red hair bobbing on her shoulders. The dark circles under her eyes showed her desperation.

Harry, who was still on paternity leave, could only nod and agree.

So out they went, out into the sunlight as a family of three. The harsh lit hit them first, so bright it was nearly blinding. Harry should have seen that as a promotion but his wife was driven, dammit. Her shoulders were thrown back, her freckled nose pointed towards the sun, her back upright. She’d never looked more beautiful.

The first mistake happened from the off. They loaded James into his pram, buckled him in, and headed down the path. But Ginny, in her haste, didn’t see Harry’s foot.

“Sodding—“ he swore, biting his lip.

Ginny’s hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide. “Oh no, sorry! I didn’t mean—“

Harry waved her off. “Fine, it’s fine, let’s just go.”

Who knew a pram could be so heavy? Harry supposed it was a fancy contraption, all straps and hooks. Ginny picked it from the shop back when she was still “big as a house” (her words), but he reckoned he didn’t hate the thing, really. More that—

“Nooo!” Ginny’s cry cut through his musings. Harry looked up, startled, to see rain beginning to fall from the sky.

Harry winced and tried to put things in a positive light. “Maybe it’s just a drizzle, love. Surely—“

He was cut off when the drizzle turned to a downpour not a minute later. It was April, after all; these things happened in April. But they weren’t meant to happen the first time they got a bloody break!

With a groan, Ginny turned the pram around and headed back up the path. The air was already turning humid and moist, beginning to carry that damp smell. Harry knew they were having similar thoughts: it wasn’t going to let up, was it? With a sigh, Harry helped her turn the pram around and they began the tiny trek back.

James started shrieking about halfway there, even though their house was still in sight. Ginny let out a frustrated whimper and tucked his now-soggy blanket around his face, but (predictably) that did nothing. Harry grumbled too. He hadn’t realized how much he needed the fresh air, how much—

NO! His heart jumped into his throat as his whole body catapulted forwards. He caught a fleeting glimpse of his trainer, caught on a rock, before he somersaulted head over heels and landed in a puddle.

Oh for the love of...

He stood up, brushing off his trousers, before he realized there was no use. Everything was soaked through with water and mud. His glasses were even speckled with it. He felt Ginny’s hand resting on his elbow as she pulled him to his feet.

“No, no, get the baby!” he said hastily. “I’m fine, I’m—“

“You’re my family too, Harry,” she said fiercely, trying her hardest to glare at him even though the rain pelted down on her face.

He gave her a weak smile but nonetheless reached for the pram. James’ cries were now a full-fledged sob.

By the time they reached the house again, the three were all soaked to the bone. Harry was somehow the only one covered in mud, but no one looked particularly good. Predictably, James was still sobbing, his tiny face screwed up in discomfort.

“There there,” Ginny soothed, pressing his face to her breast. But that baby wasn’t having it. He thrashed against her, kicking her now, as if screaming that he was displeased, darn it, and they’d better help!

“I’ll erm put the kettle on?” Harry suggested, staring at the two of them uncertainly.

“You’ll of nothing of the kind,” said Ginny sharply. “You’ll take these soaking clothes off the baby, then yourself, then the two of you can take a bath. Ok?”

He could only nod weakly and obey. Mother always knows best.

It was an hour before things settled down at all. James was napping his cot, Ginny and Harry were wearing dressing gowns, and the fire was crackling beside them. She’d whipped up some soup as they sat at the kitchen table, their fingers brushing against each other.

“That was miserable,” he said, stating the obvious.

Ginny just shook her head. “My fault for trying to go on a walk in April.”

“You need to get out,” Harry replied, shrugging. “It’s only natural. I do reckon, though, that a hippogriff with a hernia would have caused a bit less destruction, especially seeing as how I was soaked to the bone.”

Then is where the third fatal error happened. Ginny, sleep-deprived and exhausted, snorted into her soup. But that wasn’t all. Harry could only watch in horror as it unfolded, right in front of his eyes. In one swift movement, he watched as she giggled into the soup, then a scalding air bubble hit her right in the nose… and… no!

The soup hit Ginny, square in the face, hard enough for her to drop the bowl, right on the floor. Right onto his foot.

“SODDING PIECE OF—“ Harry let out a swear, hopping on one foot, as Ginny rushed to apologize and reached for her wand.

“No no no!” Ginny cried, magicking up the mess. “We don’t have any Dittany, Harry, I’m so—“

There was a half-second of silence as they stared at each other: Harry still holding his foot, which had now been tripped over, burned, and had soup dropped on it. Ginny, hair still wet from the shower, but now covered in soup. Still, though, things could get worse, couldn’t they? They both knew what was coming… and then it did. James’ ear-piercing wail cracked through the house, growing angrier by the second.

Right then, Harry knew he had two choices: laugh or cry.

Thankfully, Ginny made the choice for him… and chose the latter.

It started with a tiny guffaw, a small giggle, and slowly escalated into something all-consuming. Something so infectious that Harry couldn’t help joining in.

No, he thought, wrapping her in a hug. She smelled of soup and mud, of broken dreams and baby powder. But she also smelled of flowers, just as she had when they met.

They didn’t have it all together, he knew… but together, they had it all.

1/? Hi I'm an ocean witch and I'm currently doing a month-long ritual leading up to my birthday in August. The point of it requires some context: I grew up in a Southern state, not a drop of ocean water to be found, yet ever since I discovered the ocean when I was young, I've always felt drawn to it. I'm a big believer in past lives and believe I may have been something ocean-related in one. But I've always felt connected to the water. Bodies of water, in general, but specifically the ocean.

1/? I've always dreamt of how the waves look, how it would be to swim past a kelp forest and coral reef into the vast empty expanse of blue water. To see a storm from underneath, the surface torn by winds and rain. And I've always felt drawn to merfolk. Growing up, there were many little plants around my yard. We had a honeysuckle bush on the fence, a bush in the yard that grew bundles of little purple and pink flowers, a peach tree, tulips in the backyard and tons and tons of fairy rings.

1/? I would water these plants and never, ever step in the fairy rings since I knew old tales of humans who would. After I left, everything, even the fairy rings, died. When I was 10 years old, I found a spell online that by now, everyone's knows of or heard of it, where you would wear a charm necklace for a week, say the spell in the bath under a full moon, and become a merperson when the week was up. I did it, having this really beautiful heart stone that shone different colors and since lost.

1/? But something.. weird happened. My last day of the spell was on a Friday. I remember that week (and the many before it) of dreaming, hoping, and wishing to be a merman. When I fell asleep that night, I awoke in water. A few feet off the shore, the water was clear as day. Big stone pillars covered in algae dotted the seafloor and I felt a pull to start swimming, to find something. Ahead of me I saw a flash of an orange/yellowish tail. It wasn't a dolphin or shark or anything like that.

1/? I swam after her. It felt like whoever or whatever this was had feminine energy. She turned left, right by a pillar, and I woke up. My heart was pounding and in one fluid motion, from the seconds between seeing her vanish and waking up, I ripped the necklace off. I calmed myself and went back to bed, then having a dream with hints of clouds and feathers. For years and years I've tried to figure out what this dream means, who that being was, and why I dreamt of air after that since I feel

1/? little to no connection to it. And then I grew much older, moved in with some witchy friends, and started my oceanic craft. Only.. I had a dream, a couple months ago (I can lucid dream somewhat and have always had very vivid ones). My friends and I were driving down a road I know in my town, but it was covered on either side by trees. A forest. We stopped the car by a rundown convenience store to get gas and snacks. It was the dead of night and when I looked up from the car, I saw a sky

1/? full of a thousand stars, a thousand galaxies. It was so vast and you could see every single one. I ripped my gaze away, instead going inside the store with my boyfriend and this girl with hair this shade of orange it looked almost red, piercing green eyes, and freckled white skin. I wasn't aware I hadn't seen her before in my life, and we entered. My boyfriend was asked to stay in the very small entrance, two people sat at a table in front of a door barring him from entry. They let the girl

1/? and I enter. We did and saw a rectangular table with many people sitting at it, all but one I didn't get good vibes about. The one who felt okay was at a corner seat, flashing my friend and I a kind look. I sat the table, which was filled with 3D shapes of all kinds, colorless, top and bottom. In front of me was a very large book, opened to a random page. They told us we had to solve some kind of puzzle and could use the book if needed. I kept looking at the shapes for meaning and before I

1/? knew it our time was up. Here I actively affected the dream by telling them, no, give us another chance. They reset the timer and we started. I flipped the pages to find a folded up piece of paper. I glanced at the woman at the corner seat and it was an old friend of mine. She smiled and winked at me. I looked at the book and looked back, but she was the woman from before. The page I'd flipped to had a picture of a lushous, green valley in it and a folk tale about a lava horse, similar to a

1/? kelpie but benevolent. The piece of paper had a spell written on it. But they were mad we got it and we had to escape. I wasn't worried about my boyfriend or friends, I knew they could get themselves out of trouble. I used the spell and the red-haired girl turned in the lava horse from the story. I hopped on her back and she created a portal to a valley similar to the one in the picture. When I woke in the valley, the girl (not in horse form) and I were in a car, driving in the lil valley

1/? town. One either side were strips of valley that went upward, leading to a dam that people walked on. The girl and I made our ascent and caught a group of people throwing airplanes off the bridge, but they flew so far and didn't really look like airplanes. They offered for us to throw some. I think the girl did. But I had turned to see past the dam. It was an expanse of forests and a field. It stretched on for miles. And I remember smelling the sea breeze and a splash of water before I woke

1/? And that was the dream. My roommate actually had a dream a while back with the same exact red-haired girl in it. We think she may be a Fae. I don't know what this dream means. My friends suggested it could be an introduction to elemental trials to where I have to get through them to go back to the place I dreamt of when I was 10 and that's what my ritual's for. All this month, I've been working with offerings and Caer Ibormeith, Dream Goddess, to try to go back to that spot. Not dream since

1/End I know I was younger and different. I wanted to know your thoughts and apologize for how long this got. I wanted to ensure you had plenty of context. I've also worked with certain sea energies/creatures before and though landlocked, I know my magick is powerful. I really need to get back there. To know what it all meant. And I wanted your thoughts and advice on the matter. Do you think it will be a series of trials? With Earth, Air, Fire and Water? The last dream felt like an introduction.

I also forgot to mention that since July 1, after soaking it in rainwater, I've been wearing a crystal necklace (nearly transparent, light purple/blue in color) and did a ritual bath for the Buck Moon to invoke a similar call to magick that I did at 10. Thank you for reading, sorry about all the tasks. 😳

I apologise if I miss something, so just send in another ask if I do.

First and foremost, I think you should look into starseeds. Mintakan, specifically. They are strongly drawn to water, dream of swimming, compassionate, etc etc. There’s a lot more too it but those are just some key points I noticed.

Also, your first dream kind of sounds like a memory. You should look into the meaning behind each detail and each dream. It will take a while but I think it will give you some answers. Make sure you figure out how the details are connected to each other too. (This may not apply across dreams).

I agree that the girl in your dream may be fae, too. Most have green eyes, and since yours is paired with pale skin, she’s probably a Seelie. Their hair is also indicative of their first element. Some think that the four elements are where faeries originate, which would explain why each faerie has its own element which it can control and create. Mermaid/merman faeries are also a thing and they have the ability to breathe underwater, giving them infinite air.

I believe that the mermaid in one dream and the orange haired girl in another are the same. And, assuming she is fae, she has used/incorporated all four elements in some way. (Walked by a forest, breathed under water, was an underwater creature, colour of her hair, etc).

I’m not too sure if this is a trial but you could ask your deity about it. You have a lot of signs pointing towards one as each element is a reoccurring theme in your dreams.

I also can’t help but feel the need to ask if you did ever step in a faerie circle, even accidentally. There feels like there’s something else you don’t know about the situation so that was my first thought.

One last thing. I’m not sure how you feel about this, nor how I do honestly, but it might be worth researching fae-people. As in humans that are faeries. I don’t know much about them but I know they can be either born or turned.

Don’t be shy if you want me to clarify or help with something!! Lmk if I missed something too

HAPPY NEW DECADE MY DUDES! IT IS WODENSDAY AND I BRING YOU GHOSTS!

Nerds chat, big sisters are consulted, ghosts are fought, magick is performed

“You know, Danny, one day you have to do something that isn’t mind-blowingly awesome,” Tucker said.  “One of these days it’ll happen. You’ll say something plain and boring, not ‘I’ve been to the moon’ or ‘I found the ghost that was haunting my locker and made fast friends with him’.”  Tucker didn’t really mean that of course, he wasn’t sure Danny was capable of doing something that wasn’t impressive. Then again that might’ve just been because Tucker thought everything Danny did was impressive.  They were flying over Amity Park on hoverboards controlled by their gloves, all because of Danny.

“Tucker, please,” Danny scoffed, “It’s not that what I say will be something dull and normal, it’ll just be what our new normal is pretty soon.”  Danny had his hood up, somehow, and didn’t both wearing his helmet. Unlike Tucker, he didn’t actually need it to keep safe in the air. He wove around Tucker in circles before diving for the park, a cheer on his lips.  Tuck dove after him, and soon enough a monochrome figure came into view, blurry at the edges but his face matched his yearbook photo easily enough. The two skidded to a stop and hopped off their boards - which took more effort than was convenient, he’d have to figure out a way to fix that - and Danny held up a hand for a high five.  Sidney flinched back a bit and Tuck cleared his throat.

“Danny, high fives were invented around the ’70s.  Sidney is from the 50s.” Tucker slapped Danny’s hand to demonstrate and grinned.  “It’s just a greeting, like a handshake but faster. Hi, I’m Tucker Foley.” He held out his hand and Sidney stared at him.  “I’m the furthest thing from a bully.”

“Tucker is the geekiest guy in the world.”  Tucker stepped on Danny’s foot for that, grinning at the yelp he received.  “That’s a compliment you dork!”

“Sidney Poindexter,” he finally shook Tucker’s hand, and smiled.

“So, Sidney, how’s it been, finally being back on Earth?”  Leave it to Danny to ask the awkward question.

Sidney just lit up like a christmas tree though and spread his arms out to gesture at the park.  “It’s been amazing! Everyone looks so different and all the cars are so much faster and sleeker than before - colorful too!  I’ve never seen so many different kinds of people just hanging out with each other! Though there’s a lot I don’t understand, and I guess that’s just how the future is supposed to feel but goly these rectangles people are tapping on seem to do a lot .”

“Yeah, different time periods make for pretty different experiences,” Danny mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck.  “Speaking of experiences, what’s it like on the other side?” On one hand Tucker wanted to smack Danny with his hat for that, but on the other he understood wanting to know.  They weren’t exactly about to go through the portal to find out and get lost.

“Oh.  Well uh, for a while I was just floating around in the green void, passing through doors and islands and buildings and even other ghosts.  According to some Will O Wisps I wasn’t really a ghost yet, just a soul that got stuck in the Infinite Realms.” Danny had pulled out his journal, looking at Sidney intently and Tucker knew the look on his face.  Danny was hyperfocused by now. “That’s what it’s called, by the way, the Infinite Realms. Cause it goes on forever n ever and apparently anybody from everywhere can end up there. It felt like I was in there for years before enough of the uh…”

“Ectoplasm?”  Danny held up a hand and with visible concentration silvery green light jumped between his fingers and wrapped around them like a blanket.

Sidney snapped his fingers.  “Yeah, ectoplasm! Enough of it bonded to me that I could touch things around me again, which was swell!  It was pretty scary too, though, cause anything can become a ghost…”

“Huh… like dragons, and jersey devils and chupacabras?”  Tucker snorted at Danny, rolling his eyes.

“What, have you met bigfoot?”

“No, but I did meet the Fiskerton Phantom, and a komodo dragon that can turn invisible.”

“Like I said, scary stuff.  But uh, ghosts can make these things, places, called Sanctuaries where they can be safe, which is what most of the islands and stuff in the Realms are.  And I managed to make one, and I was safe from most of the more dangerous ghosts out there! But… that safety didn’t really last.”

“Did you go through a portal and end up trapped in your mirror somehow?”  Sidney flickered like static and laughed, a hollow sound that made Tucker shiver and his skin crawl.

“Oh wouldn’t that’ve been better?  No, I messed up. I hadn’t listened to the ghost with the blue dress and blonde hair that told me how making a sanctuary works - or I guess I didn’t ask enough questions about it.”  Sidney’s eyes flickered red and Tucker felt a tug in his hand, looking down to see his helmet was glowing green. “It was based on my memories .  The most recent ones too, so I ended up in my own Casper High with a bunch of… I dunno, echoes or shadows of the bullies from my life and by the time I realized what had gone wrong I couldn’t get out.”  Sidney wrapped his arms around himself and Tucker was absolutely about to lose hold of his helmet.

“Sidney, would you like a hug?  Cause you sound like you need a hug.”  Danny spread his arms wide open for Sidney, and over the din of insults and jeers and horrible laughter that Tucker could hear from Poindexter, he could hear the ebb and crash of waves on a beach coming from Danny.  Sidney blinked, looking up at Danny with wide eyes and for a few moments he didn’t do anything. Then he nodded and was being pulled into the inescapable warmth of Danny’s hug.  

“Dang, that sounds like a job for Jazz.  She can use her super psychology powers to help you out.”  Tucker set down his helmet, which was no longer about to fly away, and pulled the Fenton Finder™ out of his jacket - which Tucker had figured out how to add a porta pocket to while he was building the tangibility modulator.  When he looked up, Sidney was far more solid looking and Danny was staring at him like he’d handed him the moon and said it was his. “What?”

“Tucker Foley, you absolute genius! ”  Danny’s arm swung out and Tucker was dragged into the hug.

“Okay, I absolutely am a genius, but what did I say?”

“Sidney, I have an older sister named Jazz - who you cannot tell about my ghost half by the way, that’s a big secret - and like, a hug is good for a lot of things but having someone to talk to is way better!”

Sidney squirmed in the embrace and phased out of it, leaving Tucker to his fate of being pressed against his best friend like a teddy bear.  “I uh. I dunno about that. Last time I had someone to talk to it was the guidance counselor and that uh.  Well let’s just say my death was more than just bullies being too rough.”

Oh, Tucker did not like that at all.  “I promise you, Jazz is 500 times better than that.  She’d never hurt anyone that needs her help like that.”

Sidney still looked sceptical but Danny let go of Tucker and lowered his voice to something soft and sure.  “Sidney, Jazz is my big sister. She’s literally always trying to make sure I’m feeling as good as is humanly possible in the face of all the weirdness our parents have put us through.  When I was 7 and she was 9 the christmas turkey came to life and she fought it off because I was too small to fight at all and then she taught me what she knew about martial arts. There’s not a thing in the world I wouldn’t trust Jazz with, and you should trust her too.  But, I can’t make you trust her and I still have to ask her if she’ll do it.”

Sidney took a breath, fully opaque for once, and gave Danny a shaky thumbs up.  “Sure.”

“Awesome as that is,” Tucker said, raising the Fenton Finder.  “I need to scan you so we can make sure that the security system doesn’t shoot you if something bad happens in the school.”

If there was any one chore that Jazz would happily dump on her little brother were he there for her to give it to him, it was moving boxes of scrapped experiments to the shed.  Danny very clearly needed the exercise and Jazz didn’t, and it was tedious. She was a good older sister, she deserved a bit of pettiness. Besides, it meant that she could only give Spike half of her attention as he complained about his little brother cryptid hunting.  “Tell Wes that even if he’s right, he shouldn’t endanger the cryptids by trying to show them off to humanity. If you appeal to his empathy he’ll probably either actually stop, or at least stop coming to you about it so that you don’t try and guilt him for what he’s doing.”

“Wouldn’t expect that kind of manipulation from you, Jazz.  Is that what you do to get your brat to be quiet for five seconds?”

“First of all, I’m studying psychology Spike.  I know how people work.” She set down a box of broken tools and failed devices that would only see the light of day as melted down and repurposed scrap in some other experiment.  “Secondly, how dare you insinuate I don’t find Danny’s info dumps about space interesting. It’s adorable and he’s very informative.”

“Uh, rude?  I’m not cute, in the slightest.”  Jazz turned to see Danny pouting in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest.  “I’m a total badass.”

“Badasses can carry all this scrap from the lab to the shed, shorty.”

“Heck, aren’t you clever?  Like, the best at thinking up any response to anything.  You know, I uh. I have something you might not have the perfect answer for.”  Danny’s hands were stuffed in his pockets now and his shoulders were hunched. This was important.

“Spike, I’ll talk to you later.  Remember, morality!” Jazz hung up and ruffled Danny’s hair, grinning at the pout he gave her.  “So?”

“So,” he said back, rocking on his heels.  “You don’t like, agree with Mom and Dad about ghosts, right?”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to disagree they exist when I shot one off of you, little brother.  I’d be pretty bad at the scientific method if I ignored proof right in front of my eyes.”

Danny huffed a laugh and shook his head.  “No no, I mean like… what they think of ghosts.  You don’t think they’re all ‘evil’ for being ghosts, right?”

Jazz rolled her eyes.  “Danny there’s no such thing as evil.  I may have been… less than correct about ghosts existing but I do know that Mom and Dad know nothing about psychology.”  She watched some of the tension in Danny’s posture die down and poked his stomach.  “Why?”

“Right,” he said and took a breath.  “So, if I were to show you, hypothetically, someone in need of therapy who may or may not be a bit deceased-”

“Can someone only be a bit deceased but otherwise ok?”

“You’d be surprised,” he huffed.  “Enough that it’s obvious anyway? Would you, hypothetically, be able to help?”

Jazz rolled that over in her head a bit.  Danny had found a ghost that disproved their parents’ hypothesis - or prejudiced stereotype, a toss-up if any - and felt they needed psychiatric help but didn’t trust any Amity doctor not to call the Fentons or try to charge the dead a fee.  That or he was fucking with her, but Danny was bad at hiding his distress and the longer she stayed silent the more he fidgeted.

“So whose ghost are you asking me to help out?  I’m not Mom and Dad but I do have every right to worry about a stranger you’re inviting into your life.”  Danny sighed and relaxed more than he had in a while around her. Jazz couldn’t help but smile, even as she was crushed in a hug.  “Lungs.”

“You’ll be fine and his name is Sidney Poindexter.”  Danny squeezed her one more time before letting go.  “According to Tucker, he’s the guy who used to have my current locker.”

“You have a haunted locker at school… why am I not surprised?”  Jazz shook her head, covering her face with her hand. “Sidney Poindexter, that kid who reportedly suffered the most bullying in the history of the school and … ok, wow, he really would need therapy if he were to hypothetically come back to the land of the living.  I wonder where I might find him?” Danny didn’t need to hear any of the less pleasant details of that story unless Sidney chose to tell him.

“No clue.  When I finish coming up with that hypothetical part of the situation I’ll tell you.”  Danny fired her a pair of finger guns and backed away slowly, somehow not tripping over his own feet like the last time she saw him do that.  “Later Spazz.”

“Remember not to smear your weird UV paint all over your jacket, Picasso.”

“THOSE WERE NOT SMEARS, IT WAS ART,” he said, and Jazz held onto the door while she laughed.

“I’m worried about Danny.”  Jazz had to wait until lunch and sped through eating just to find him, but she’d tracked down Vice-Principal Lancer and he agreed to walk and talk.  “He’s been through a lot lately, what with tests and bring hunted by a robot like an animal and social pressures and I know it’s getting to him.”

Lancer arched a brow and sighed at her as they turned a corner.  “Have you tried talking, Jazz? It’s the staple of human survival, communication, and all kinds of relationships.”

“I’d talk with him if I could, Mr.Lancer, but I’m his older sister and I’m afraid Danny’s reaching a point in his life where you keep things from your family while you try and figure it out on your own to be more independent.”  If Jazz noticed Lancer giving her a pointed look, he hadn’t verbally acknowledged her glasshouse so she could throw as many stones as she so pleased. They stopped and Lancer fished out a ring of keys. “He wouldn’t talk to me about this, probably wouldn’t even listen when I try and tell him to open up to someone.  Also, why are we heading into the guidance counselor’s office? Have you gotten a license in that as well?” It was a joke among the upperclassmen that Lancer was at least vaguely equipped to substitute teach literally every class in their underfunded school.

Lance snorted and flipped through keys.  “No, Jazz, we’ve actually finally managed to grab a guidance counselor.  You know I can’t do everything around here.”

“You most certainly seem to.”

“Be that as it may, Jazz, he may listen to me and I’ll try talking to him but have you considered this all is- Great Gatsby!”  Jazz turned away from Lancer to see what startled him and felt every muscle in her body lock up in shock.  The room was a mess, burn marks reminiscent of Dad’s latest weapon going off randomly at home littered the walls, the desk was flipped upside down and acrid smoke met her nostrils nearly choking her.  Or maybe she had simply stopped breathing when her eyes landed on the figure in the center of the room, green light radiating from their form in all directions casting eerie shadows everywhere and wide green lights bright as torches shone from underneath a cloud of white and above a mass of black and white material.  They pulled a black hood up over their curly white hair and a masculine voice hissed out a quiet, forceful and slightly reverberating, “ Shit. ”

Holding up his hands, the figure’s eyes dimmed slightly and Jazz could make out bright blue skin tinged with a bit of green.  “Now I know what this looks like, but I promise there’s a perfectly logical explanation.”

“You’re a ghost.”  Jazz wasn’t asking a question, her voice pitched up in a desire to be horribly wrong more than curiosity.

“Lab Safety is important.”  The green light flickered, a blue face made indistinct by the light show and the shadows of the hood visibly cringed and Lancer gasped in horror in front of her.  “I know that maks this illogical by default.”

“That depends,” Jazz said slowly while reaching into her pocket and fishing for a small tube of what would look like lipstick to anyone else, “on why you trashed the room.  This does look pretty-”

“Jasmine what are you doing!?”  Lancer hissed, and while Jazz was certain he meant the talking in general, the light in the boy’s eyes shifted toward her hand.  He sucked in a superfluous breath and vanished from sight while Jazz let off a litany of swears in her head.

“I was trying to get some information from him, Mr. Lancer.  He had an explanation apparently and I wanted to hear it.” Jazz dropped the lipstick tube back into her pocket and crossed her arms.  “Didn’t you just tell me that communication is important?”

“Important as it is, Jasmine,” Lancer said with what Jazz recognized as a lecturing tone and decided that she already didn’t like what he had to say. “That was a ghost and I do believe the experts - your parents - have advised us all to avoid grabbing the attention of a ghost unless we want to become one.”  Of all the times for anyone to actually acknowledge her parents’ work and knowledge and it was now?

“With all due respect, Vice Principal Lancer, I think that of all things to listen to my parents about for once, their biased prejudice against all things ghost is hardly the one to believe.  If everyone that died was malicious then the second they got a way into the living world we’d be overrun and there wouldn’t be a living world anymore.”  Gesturing to herself and a staring Lancer she drawled, “I’d say we’re proof that my parents are wrong.”

While Lancer tried visibly to come up with an intelligent response to that, Jazz flicked on the lights and gave the room a closer look than she had before.  Walking around she noticed the tiniest drops of ectoplasm lingering near where the burn marks were, and just under the desk. Pulling out a vial or three and some cotton swabs, Jazz put away a few samples to check over later.  Even if she didn’t want to so much as acknowledge that her parents were right about ghosts existing, or fight them, she wasn’t going to bury her head in the sand and ignore all the evidence that said she needed to either get someone else to do something or do it herself.  What’s one more thing to steal my sleep away?

She turned to a puzzled Lancer and cleared her throat.  “It looks to me like a fight was happening here. A teenaged boy venting his anger over being d-” Breathe and don’t think about it.  “In his particular situation would go somewhere he probably won’t get caught, not a school with a security system made specifically to shoot until he’s a bubbling pile of green sludge upon activation.  I wish I knew what he was fighting and why but unfortunately he saw me reaching for a weapon and bolted.”

“Reaching for a weapon, Jazz?”  Heaving a sigh she met the arched brow on Lancer’s face with a very practiced look she gave teachers that tried to paint her as being wrong about something.

“Principal Ishiyama said that we can use them in emergency situations and while I hardly share my parents’ opinion that all ghosts are malevolent mindless creatures, a teenager made of thoughts and emotions that just finished fighting isn’t someone I want to talk to without an option to defend myself.  I’m safe around other human beings because I practice several martial arts, not because everyone is harmless.”

“That’s rather… pragmatic of you, Jazz.”  Lancer let out a breath and the tension left his shoulders.  He clasped a hand on her shoulder and Jazz was lead out of the destroyed room.  “I personally feel that you need to speak with someone about all of this as much as Daniel does.  After all, it is happening to you too.”

“I appreciate your worry, Mr. Lancer, but it’s not necessary.”  Jazz smiled at the man. “As much as I’m sure this guidance counselor will be great for the other students, I have someone I can talk to already.”

“That’s good, Jazz.  Still, if you need any help I’m certain that Ms. Spectra will be happy to give it to you.”

"She saw me.  She saw me in a busted up room with my hands glowing, and I shit you not, she reached for a weapon."  Danny paced in Tucker's room with his hood down and hands wildly gesticulating. “Now she and Mr. Lancer probably think I’m some destructive monster.  There’s no way I could’ve made a worse impression.”

“Well,” Sidney said from his spot reclined in the air and watching Tucker play God of War, “when I first met you I thought you were bullying someone.”

“Plus,” Tucker chirped as he attempted, fruitlessly, to fight a Valkyrie, “you could’ve accidentally shot them.  Much worse impression.” Kratos died on screen and Tucker growled to himself, lifting his controller to toss it and dropping it with a grimace instead.  “That thing really fucked up my arm, huh?”

Danny sucked in a breath and held up a hand, pulling out bands of silver and green light from his center, gathering it above his palm as best as he could.  It flickered and slipped out of his grasp every few seconds, like trying to hold water in a barely cupped hand. “I could try healing you?”

“Danny,” Sam drawled while putting down her book, “are you sure you know how to do that?  It looks like your ectoplasm is glitching through you instead of listening to you.” Danny observed his arm, focusing on the first plane of existence as hard as he could, and huffed a sigh in agreement that it did look like a patch of glitchy green and white around his hand.  “Hold out your hand, and Tucker hold out your arm for me.” The boys obliged and Sam held out a hand of her own, eyes closed, and pinched the ectoplasm haphazardly flowing around Danny’s hand. Danny’s eyes widened as she pulled the silvery light out of him and into her own aura, a few words being muttered in Hebrew as it flowed through her body to the other hand, and into Tucker’s arm.  When the light faded, Danny felt tired and hungry, while Tucker looked far more relaxed than he had in a while. “Viola.” 

Tucker looked from his arm to Sam and back several times, flexing and stretching the appendage.  “Sam, I cannot emphasize this enough, holy shit. ”  Sam grinned smugly at them while Danny, Tucker, and Sidney all stared at her in awe.  “How did you do that?”

“I put forth some effort and actually looked into this ghost stuff from an angle that wasn’t the Fentons’ research.  That lead to magick, which leads us to this.” Sam held up her book Magick: the Life Blood of the Earth.  “I had a feeling that using Danny’s ectoplasm might warrant immediate effects, especially since he was focusing on trying to heal Tucker.”

“Right,” Danny drawled.  “Next time ask me first? I feel hungry enough to eat a whole pig right now.”

“Mom ha-

“But with like, vegetables and stuff because I value my health.”  Tucker stuck out his tongue and Danny laughed.

“Tucker, do you have a flashlight?”  Everyone turned to look at Sidney and Tucker shrugged, pulling a miniature flashlight out of his pocket and handing it over.  Sidney turned it on and pointed it at Danny’s face. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Care to share that idea with the class, Sidney?”  Tucker picked up his controller and chuckled as he started up the fight anew.  “Is Danny supposed to photosynthesize?”

“Basically, yes!”  Danny blinked a few times and tilted his head.  “Ghosts are all made of ectoplasm, which drains pretty much anything of energy around it like a plant taking in sunlight, but some ghosts use particular forms of energy to sustain themselves, and when you were trying to heal Tucker everything got all dark, so I thought you might run better on light than just on the heat in the room.  Better for your body if your ghost half isn’t sucking all the life-sustaining heat from it, right?” Everyone stared at Sidney for a long beat, trying to process what he’d said. Danny held out his hand and pinched the beams of light coming toward him. After a moment of consideration, he imagined himself drinking the light and the flashlight immediately went dark as it flowed into his hand.  “See?”

“Sidney, you’re a genius!”  Danny pulled Sidney into a hug and beamed.  Then he started pulling on the strands of light racing through the air that he was sure no one else could see, absorbing what he was certain were the higher frequency gamma and uv lights around him.  In moments the room looked the way it had before he’d gained his new Sight and for a moment Danny felt like he was going to vibrate out of his skin. When he looked around the room however, he couldn’t help the pang of sadness that came with the lack of all those beautiful colors that only he (and Sidney he supposed) had been able to see.  “I think I’ll save doing that for when I’m desperate, but that’s awesome to know!”

“So not only are you ghosts, but you’re also plants.”  Tucker snorted. “No wonder Sam likes you so much.” Sam bopped him on the head with her book as he picked up his controller and he made an offending noise, which everyone ignored.

“Speaking of ghosts, I think I’ve just figured out a way for you to kill two birds with one stone, Danny!  If we go on patrol with the Fenton Finder™ to find the blob ghost that tried to kill us and catch it before it hurts anyone, we can capture an aggressive ghost and show the public - and your family - that ghosts aren’t all evil.”

Danny frowned, watching Tucker get his butt handed to him by Kara on screen for the 28th time, and considered that.  The shapeshifter was definitely going to hurt someone if they didn’t do anything about it and Danny knew his folks would jump on any amount proof that ghosts were all evil, likely to claim that this second malevolent spirit was a clear pattern of spiritual behavior.  They didn’t need more help sowing anti-ghost sentiments among whoever thought they weren’t entirely crazy, and he didn’t need more harassment from the asshats who thought they were and that he probably was by extension. Ugh. “Tuck, where are you on figuring out who the guy is?”

“Did you seriously think I could find out who this sentient blob of green slime with fangs and glowing red eyes that apparently shapeshifts is supposed to be?  With what, ghoulgle?” Sidney chuckled and Sam laughed, shaking her head. “I’m a genius, obviously, but I’m not a wizard, Danny.” Danny’s shoulders slumped and he sighed.  “Unless..”

“Unless?”  Sidney and Danny echoed.  Tucker looked at Sam’s book and so did the other boys, the idea sparked in their minds.

“Danny and Sidney combined aren’t going to have enough power to help me see through space and time to find out who this shapeshifter was.  If we really wanna know, we’ll have to catch them and ask them through the thermos.”

“Alright, that’s fair.”  Tucker lost in the game once more and turned the HorrorStation off.  “Y’know what, sure. Let’s go hunt a ghost. I’m up for a fight we can actually win.  Sidney, you in?”

“I-uh I’ll leave the fighting to you guys.  I’m gonna give this youtube thing a try and see what I can learn.”  He smiled and waved them off, and the trio shrugged, heading down the trap door to Tucker’s room and waving his parents goodbye.

While Sam and Tucker took their hoverboards to the air, Danny found the nearest alleyway and made sure no one was there to see him.  He took in the sight of the vivid indigo surrounding him and reached inside for the ectoplasmic green and pearlescent white inside of him, watching it unfurl over his body in a flash and carve away at the ties between him and the Earth.  He lifted off the ground and shook himself, sure that he’d never get used to it, before flying up to where Tucker and Sam were waiting for him with the Fenton Finder™ already out and his ectosignature blocked from it.  At his insistence, they decided to search together in a group since splitting up was for the idiots getting picked off in a horror movie.  Danny let himself slip into the space between spaces, where the background light of the world was blue and violet refusing to blend properly into indigo but just as intense as the indigo had been, if not more.

After an hour of searching, Danny saw a green dot at the edge of his full-body vision and the radar picked up on an ectosignature.  They all dove toward the music store where people were beginning to run while screaming their heads off, and Danny dove through the illusion people called a wall foot first, slamming into the shapeshifter mid snarl.  “Whoa there, flubber!” Danny ducked a swipe of claws and smirked. “I know jello can dance if you play loud enough music in front of it, but I didn’t know you wanted to. Screaming isn’t music unless it’s a Metallica song, man.”

Tucker and Sam burst through the doors and Sam opened fire, striking the blob while charging it like the crazy person she was.  It lunged at her, knocking over a shelf on its way, and Sam barely avoided a bladed arm cutting her head off, though her leg was nicked and she fell to the ground with a litany of swears that Danny couldn't understand.  Tucker shot the arm as it retracted into the shapeshifter and Danny dove between the angry monster and his best friend just in time for a fist the size of both of them to knock them into another shelf full of CDs. “Damn, we just fixed my arm and now my back is fucked up, Tucker groaned as he and Danny stood.  Danny saw red.

Light and heat and power gathered above Danny’s palm like a raging river into a whirlpool, while Sam shouted insults at the shapeshifter.  “Did anyone order a snot rocket?” His blast connected, knocking Discount Venom back into the help desk. An arm whipped out and caught Danny by his leg, slamming him into the ground and dragging him toward the ghost, bumping his already pounding head against every surface it could on the way.

“Aren’t you just the cleverest little bloodthirsty mutant?”  Well, they finally heard it’s high masculine voice and Danny already hated the sound of it.  “I actually felt that, you little freak.”

“If you think I’m the freak here, then you haven’t looked in the mirror lately,” Danny spat.  “I know it’s hard, but you have to acknowledge that some people have actual bodies.”

“Such a sharp wit to go with those sharp teeth, too!  Oh, but don’t worry, ghost kid, being a ghost isn’t what makes you so violent, clearly.”  Danny heard the whine of an ecto pistol and sucked in a gasp as he was chucked into the air at the same time that a blast was fired.  PAIN .  “Just ask your little murderer!  That’s twice she killed you now, isn’t it?  You really should let the other kid get a shot if you can, would-be witch.”  The blob’s voice grew distant and muffled as pain filled everything inside of Danny, and while he didn’t remember returning to human form, he knew that it was blood on his back, not ectoplasm.  His vision went dark, indigo, then blues and purple, then everything was a beautiful and impossible Lilac, and he could see and hear the stars calling out to him. He reached out and accepted their pull away from the pain in his body.

Friends/school/ or someone finds out about their relationship

“Ten years,” he mumbles, staring out the window. “Really doesn’t feel like ten years.”

Which, granted, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. Doesn’t even feel like five, sometimes, but dates don’t lie. Numbers never quite slip under our radar like that.

Ten years. We’ll be together ten years this December, and married four next June. It doesn’t feel like it’s been so long, but it has.

This December, it’ll be ten years since Simon lost his powers.

But this month, it’s been ten years since our last first day.  Or, really, Simon’s first day.

My first day back wasn’t until later, but that’s not really the point of all this.

The point, as Bunce had urged us, was to see where everyone is now. To show where we are now, as if people will care.

I steal a look at Simon at a light, watching him peer out onto the road. It’s raining, trails of drops sliding down the window and making the lights around us twinkle.

The sky’s a soft blue, still falling deeper into a night’s sky as our drive goes on.

I feel his hand curl around mine, squeezing tighter as we dip into the rolling hills and deep countryside surrounding the school.

I know how it gets to him. How it makes his skin itch and crawl, just to be around here. I know he still has nightmares on occasion, and asks me to tell him about somewhere else--anywhere else--to visualize a different life. One away from forests and magick, and the sickly feeling of being the odd one out.

It’s why I'm still confused as to why he said yes to this--to all the implications behind a reunion night. Because it feels silly to have him want to show up only to be frustrated by the outcasting that’s been there since... since...

Since ten years ago.

I rub my thumb against the skin of his hand, swallowing back my thoughts. Ten years.

I’ve loved him for more, but nobody’s known that much.

Nobody from school was invited to our wedding. We didn’t want them there.

Nor do we have any need to share it. Neither of us use social media, except the Instagram account he has to look up food accounts.

We have the Bunces, and Fiona, and that’s about it. That’s the extent of our social circle, and, I think, we’re happy with that.

I think there’s some people who don’t even know we’re coupled up--ones who didn’t go to the Leaver’s Ball, that is. Our first and last magickal public appearance, and all.

Which is why I’m still stuck on why we agreed to come around to this event. It’ll be loud, the food will be a bit shit, and I’m sure he’ll want to leave within the hour, so it feels like a wasted drive.

But he wants it, so that’s why we’re going.

That’s why we’re pulling up, the gates already drawn open, and guides to a spot set out to park in. I glance around, seeing a few people getting out and walking in, arm and arm. Some have got classmates, some with people I don’t recognize, and some, unsurprisingly, alone.

I hop out first, getting Simon’s door and letting him cling to my arm as I shut it, adjusting my jacket and buttoning it cooly before starting to lead us inside, him at my side.

Nobody really checks us--nobody really needs to. Even with his wings and tail spelled away, Simon’s as recognizable as he was the day he walked in. Still looks the same, moles and all.

And I, I think, haven’t got much of a different look. I’ve been told, though, that I look happier. Fuller.

I suppose I smile a bit more, too.

We get a few nods, a few smiles and a few peering looks, but nothing much comes about it. Nothing much happens until about a half an hour in, when Snow tugs on my sleeve.

“Is that... no...”

“What is it?”

“No, I just. I thought I’d saw Agatha. That’s all.”

I try to look above heads, pushing up onto my tiptoes for the extra bit to look around. It’s a bit hard, given there’s a lot more mingling from others than we seem too keen on doing, but surely enough, there’s a milky blonde head halfway across the room. And still moving further.

“You might have...”I say slowly, settling myself back down as I look him over. “Why? Got something to say?”

He shrugs, turning back around. He’s stationed us at the snack table (I’d called ahead. There’s sandwiches this time.) “I just... I’d never told her about us.”

I blink, thinking through it. “Really?”

“I mean, yeah. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“Can’t say I ever purposefully think about Wellbelove.”

He smiles, just a bit, and reaches for some crisps. “Yeah well,” he mumbles. “hadn’t really felt the need to catch up, since she ran so far. Figured she’d never want to be around here again.”

I’d thought the same for him. “Did you want to tell her?” I ask, voice going soft. As in, more of a “Have you really never told your bloody ex you’re married now? And to the bloke who tried to break us up?”

He looks back across, squinting at the crowd. “Dunno.” He shoves another piece in his mouth. “If you think I should?”

“I think you should do a lot of things that you don’t do.” He pinches my side, and I grin. “I think she has the right to know, Simon.”

He stops, pursing his lips before going to wipe his hand on his suit, stopping, then reaching for a napkin. “Yeah, you’re right.” He sighs, tossing it out. “Come along then.”

“What? You need proof, is it?”

He smiles. “Don’t be a numpty. You’re emotional support.”

I huff, letting him drag me across the room as I grumble. “Like a bloody purse poodle, then.”

He chuckles, weaving us around as he peers over shoulders and behind turned backs until we finally spot her.

She looks half a shade tanner than she was in school, and her hair’s chopped to a loose bob, looking undeniably pretty hanging around her shoulders.

She’s alone. No ring, no nothing. Just standing there, glass of white wine in hand, and looking statuesque as always.

I look at Simon, fearfully expecting some unwanted feelings to bubble up on him, but he instead, he just looks nervous. Like he’s coming out all over again.

Which, sort of, he is. But we do it daily. At the shops, when he comes home after, laughing over the fact that he was buying me flowers and when the shopkeep asked if they’re for his wife and he’d proudly said “Husband”.

He says it so often. Says it proudly, holding my waist, holding my hand. Any time he can say it. Any time they will left him.

But now? He seems worried. Like of all, her opinion matters.

Which is why I make the move, wrapping my arm around his waist. “Wellbelove,” I say, raising my brows at her.

She turns, eyes going wide as she glances of the two of us. Simon startles slightly, arm creeping around my back as he nods to her. She looks at us, a smile growing before she blows out a small laugh.

“I should’ve figured,” she laughs, waving us over.

Simon takes the first step, a bit wobbly, but surely enough, a step towards her.

He looks at me, then lets out a shaky breath as he grins. “Yeah, we should’ve figured, too.”

She grins, raising her glass a bit. “How long have you...?”

He hesitates, biting his lip. “Do... you remember when you and Penn came to out to Pitch Manor and picked me up?” She nods slowly. “Yeah. Night before that.”

She blinks, smiling wider. “Shit. Should’ve seen it, hm?”

He relaxes, leaning against me a bit more as he smiles back. “Yeah. Probably should’ve.”

Raiken Student Chapter 1: Worlds Upon Worlds

A pocket of flame sped past my head, singeing some strands of chestnut hair that had come loose from my braid.  I turned and barely had time to dodge out of the way as another, bigger glob of fire careened toward me.  

I shifted to look for who had created the fireballs with tufts of smoking hair sticking out all over my head.  

Clearly, I hadn’t managed to dodge it completely.

“What the hell?” I yelled toward the others around me, frazzled.

A small nervous looking boy shrank away from my voice, as the rest just stared at me blankly.

“Were those yours?” I asked the boy.  He nodded.  “Not bad.  But watch what you set on fire, will you?  Practice with your instructors in the proper areas, eh?  Not in the courtyard.”

I puffed an exaggerated sigh and the boy nodded before scurrying off toward the stables.  I smiled and shook my head, then continued on my way through the courtyard, fussing with my burnt hair as I walked.  

A few other students gave me wry looks as I walked past.

I shrugged and kept walking toward the terrace and the dormitory beyond that.  I stared up at the Kalina Tree as I walked.  

The Kalina Tree was a massive willow that stood in the center of the terrace.  The trunk of the tree was so thick it took twenty-one full-grown men touching fingertips with their arms completely stretched out to make a full closed circle around it.  Eadrin Academy was built around it because of how gigantic it is.  No one had ever heard of any tree being that big, let alone a weeping willow.   People theorized that someone powerful had altered it with magick for some reason in the past, making the founders of Eadrin think it was important.

I bowed my head to the tree as I walked past it and entered the dormitory, heading straight for the kitchen.  A few other students getting food gave me curious glances about my appearance, but I didn’t stop to explain.  I was running late, so I just grabbed a small chunk of bread, some cheese and a skin full of water.  Then headed for the dormitory gardens.

Several more students were lazing around in the gardens as I sped past them and into the miniature maze of hedgerows.  The entire garden was surrounded on three sides by the hedgerows, which acted as a sort of wall.  And there was a small maze of them toward the north end.  Normally, I would admire the patches of lilies, violets, verbena and lavender surrounding the small pond near the center as I walked.  But this day, I just continued to a nearly invisible opening through the hedgerows that marked the northern border of the garden.

I glanced around me to make sure no one was watching and slipped through, breaking out into a run toward the woods as soon as I was free of the branches.

I sprinted all the way to the woods, slowing to a jog only once I reached the cover of the trees.  Moving at a steady trot, it wasn’t long before I reached the Strom River, which is the northern border of the Eadrin Academy grounds.  

Students weren’t allowed to go across the river without trainers or instructors with them.  

But, well…  Some rules don’t always need to be followed.

Once I reached the Strom, I followed it east until I found the tree I was looking for.  To the average eye, it looked just like any other oak.  But if you looked closely, you could see that some of the branches midway up formed an unconventional bridge where they tangled with the branches of a similar tree across the river in the Shen Forest.  

I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure someone formed the bridge and strengthened the trees and branches with Zea Raiken or, simply put, life magick.  Many of the students that study at Eadrin have some form of Raiken, or magick, after all.

I climbed the tree forming half the bridge and carefully crossed to the other side.  I made my way partly down the other tree across the river and jumped down the rest of the way, breaking into a trot again after I regained my footing.

After jogging north a few more minutes, I finally reached my destination, another giant tree in the middle of the forest.  This tree, which my friends and I call the Coll Tree, isn’t quite as big as the Kalina Tree.  But you’d be hard pressed to find another birch like it.

“Where have you been?” Came a deep voice from a nearby apple tree.  “You’re late.  We only have an hour and a half until supper.”  

The dark-haired muscled bulk of my best friend, Kellen, came into view as he hopped down from the branches.  

“What the hell happened to your head, Aeli?”  

“Brecht kept me longer at the orchard.  It was like he knew I wanted to be somewhere else, so he had me load two extra carts.  Then, when I was walking through the courtyard this new kid practicing his Nera Raiken nearly set my head on fire.”

“Looks like he kind of succeeded.  Maybe if you ask Tanlin nicely, she’ll re-grow it for you.  Though, if you could ever learn how to use your power you wouldn’t have to ask someone else.”

“Alright, Mr. Eiba Raiken master.  Just because you can already control metal, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t struggle to learn our own power.”  I scowled at him.  “Anyways, where’s Maedi?”

“Right behind you.”

I jumped before turning around.  “How do you do that?”  

Maedi just smiled shyly, her green eyes gleaming in a patch of sunlight.  

“There’s nothing loud about you, is there?”  

She shook her head.  

“Just remind me never to make you angry.  Your Dima Raiken can be scary.”

She blushed and her small, lithe form straightened a bit.

I smiled back and, since I was finally not moving, I took this time to shove some bread and cheese in my mouth and wash it down with some of the water from the skin I grabbed.

“When you’re ready,” Kellen huffed.  “I’d like to get started.  We don’t have long until supper, which means less time to explore.”

I nodded and stuffed the last of the bread and cheese into my mouth.  I took another pull from my water skin and readied myself.  The others gathered in closer to me, just in case I accidentally left them behind.  

I’m not the best at controlling my Raiken, so it’s happened before.

I focused my mind and opened myself to the energy, or what we call Ken, flowing around me.  I felt around and sensed Kellen and Maedi standing near me.  Both of them contained incredible amounts of power vibrating within them.  

I then expanded my senses and felt the trees and plants around us.  A squirrel darted out, not far from us.  Its smaller amount of energy swirled about a lot faster than the slow pulsing that came from the trees.  I felt the heat and light Ken of the sun, coming through the leaves in pockets.  The wind gusted softly and the energy of its movement washed over me.  Finally, I sensed the vast pounding of power coming from the Coll Tree.  Its Ken was the biggest in the forest.  

The only thing I had ever felt with a greater amount of power was the Kalina Tree.

Now that I could feel all the bigger sources of Ken around us, I narrowed my senses in an attempt to detect the much smaller ones.  The soil beneath our feet teemed with energy, as did the air around us.  

As I searched around, I finally found what I was looking for, a tiny break in the web of Ken.  It was almost like an error in the energy flow.  Like, for some reason, Ken just didn’t move there.  Or, if it did move, it vibrated so strangely that I couldn’t sense it properly.

I zeroed in on the error spot, which was a few paces away from us.  

The spot was moving, but very slowly.  

Gently, I started to gather Ken.  I drew it in from everything around me.  Some from the plants, some from the animals, some from the wind, some from Kellen and Maedi and some from the Coll Tree.  But this was the tricky part.  If I gathered the Ken too quickly, it was possible I’d bring in more than I needed and cause an explosion that could incinerate everything nearby, including us.  Or I could drain too much energy from some smaller life forms and kill them.  

So, I took my time.  

Once I thought I had enough, I compressed the Ken and pushed it into the moving break, letting it re-expand slowly.  Once the energy entered the break, it stopped moving and began to stabilize.

As the energy expanded and changed, so did the error in the Ken web.  After the crack had grown to a hole about the size of a rabbit, something interesting could be seen through it, another world.

I studied the alien world as the hole grew bigger.  It didn’t seem outwardly dangerous.  Sometimes we could tell if a world was too dangerous to enter before a portal was opened, but this one seemed all right.  Just strange.

The light coming through the opening was blue.  

I cocked my head at the sight, trying to decide what it meant.  I glanced at Kellen and Maedi to see if they had any ideas.  

Kellen shrugged.

“Maybe the star that world utilizes as its sun is blue,” Maedi said softly.  

My dark eyebrows drew together as I studied her round face framed by chin length blond hair.  

I never would have thought of that.  And I have no idea how she thought of that.  

I looked back toward the portal, which had stopped growing, but was still too small for us to fit through. I never said I was perfect.  And opening a portal to another world wasn’t exactly easy.  So, I gently drew more energy and added it directly to the opening.  

Soon, it was ready.  

All in all, the time it took to create the portal was probably around ten minutes.  It used to take me nearly forty-five to get it right without killing something small in the process.  Definitely an improvement.

I stepped toward the opening, trying to get a better look at the other world before I decided to enter.  It was hard for my eyes to focus in the blue light, so I looked at Kellen and Maedi again to see what they thought.  

Maedi shrugged and Kellen nodded eagerly, setting his dark-skinned face into a roguish smirk.

I poked my head through the portal and, having not seen anything I thought potentially dangerous, stepped through.  Kellen and Maedi followed close behind me.  After about a minute of squinting around, my eyes adjusted to the blue light.  

I glanced at Maedi close by.  Her blond hair reflected the light in a way that made it look sky blue.  Kellen’s shoulder length black hair just looked even darker in the light.  Not surprising.  

I wondered how my chestnut brown hair looked.  Then I remembered that a lot of it had been scorched.  I drew my braid up and around to my face, but I couldn’t see if it was scorched or not.  It all looked muddled.  So, I dropped it and went back to examining our surroundings.

Even with my eyes adjusting to the light, it was difficult to figure out what I was looking at.  The ground below our feet was dark blue, almost black in some places.  And it seemed to be wriggling, just slightly.

I bent over to touch it and it felt strange, jelly-like.  Kellen gave me a questioning look but I just shrugged.

I scanned the horizon.  Just about everything had a blue tint to it.  I looked up and found the sun, which was, as Maedi had guessed, blue.

“Huh…” I said.

“What?” Kellen asked.

“Mae was right.  Look.  Blue sun.”

All three of us looked up.

“Weird,” Kellen and I said at the same time.

We went back to scanning our surroundings.  We seemed to be in the middle of a meadow-like area.  In one direction, giant blue-green mountains rose.  And in another, we could see strange tree-like structures.  In the other directions, we just saw the meadow continue on to the horizon.

“Which way?” Maedi asked.

“I dunno.  Let’s just walk this way, I guess,” I said, and we started walking toward the tree-like structures.

As we got closer, it became clear that what we were seeing were not trees.  Or, at least, they weren’t like any trees in our world.  They were as tall as trees.  But they had big, long trunks with multiple arms that stretched out in a circle from the top.  And they were translucent, reflecting just enough of the blue light for us to see them.  

But that wasn’t even the weirdest part.  Some of the things were moving on their own.  They would bend at the trunk until their tops where nearly flat on the ground.  And then they would flip over and plant their trunks again.  They didn’t have any roots, just a base on the trunk that suctioned it to the ground.  The arms moved too.  We could see them stretch out every so often and retract back toward the top of the trunk.

“What are they?” Kellen asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I feel like I’ve seen something like this before in Adyskia,” Mae said.  Kellen and I both stared at her blankly.  “In a book,” she quickly added.

“What book?” I asked.

“It had to do with creatures that live in fresh water.”  We continued to stare at her.  She shrugged slightly.  “The book was sitting on Master Figlop’s desk.”

“Why were you in the Zea Master’s office?” Asked Kellen.

“I was asking him a question about the nature of Zea Ken and how life forms use it to move.  I wanted to know if he thinks it could be possible for someone with Dima Raiken to tap into that kinetic energy created when they move and use it to move other non-metal, inanimate objects like I can normally control.  Or use it to strengthen myself.”

Kellen and I had matching faces with scrunched eyebrows and mouths that were stupidly hanging open.

“Sorry I asked…” Said Kellen after a moment.

“What was the answer?” I asked.

“Hm?  Oh, he didn’t know.”

“Oh.  Ok.  Well, anyways,” I said, “what did the book say about the water creatures?”

“Well, in our world, they’re really small. Like, the size of a fly at the biggest. ��And they live in fresh water.  There are plenty in Cemlyn Lake.”  My forehead shrank as my eyebrows went up.  “I don’t think the ones in Adyskia are this complex though.”

“Are they dangerous?” Kellen asked.  “Not when they’re Adyskian size.  I mean, are these giant ones heredangerous?”

Maedi stared at the ground for a moment, her green eyes searching.  “I’m not sure.  I remember something about them using their arms to capture other organisms as prey, but we might be too heavy for them.  I don’t think they really have muscles.  At least, I don’t think the ones back home do.”  She looked back toward the creatures.

“We should probably keep our distance.  Just in case.” I said.

Despite my warning, Maedi started walking toward them.

“Mae! What are you doing?” I yelled.

She didn’t stop walking.  “Look.  There’s something flying toward that one.”  

She didn’t even turn toward us.  

She’s kind of scary when she’s determined about something.

Kellen and I jogged after her.

“Mae, please!” Kellen called.  “Don’t get too close!”

Still, she kept walking.  

“The tentacles are moving toward whatever is flying over there.  Watch.”

Finally, she stopped about twenty paces away from the nearest creature.  Kellen and I caught up with her and watched too.

The tentacles of the creature were indeed moving at a steady pace toward something flying by it.  Then suddenly, one of the arms shot out, extending to a length that seemed impossible.  It wrapped around the unsuspecting winged creature, which gave a high-pitched shriek when it realized it was under attack.  Several more tentacles wrapped around the struggling animal.  After a few moments of struggle, it gave one final shudder and then was still.

Slowly, the tentacles began to contract, bringing the prey in toward the top of its trunk.  The animal disappeared for a moment and then we saw it haltingly slide down inside the translucent trunk.  Right away we could see whatever flesh covered the prey begin to melt away.

We were all so intent on watching the creature eat, that we didn’t even notice the tentacles of another crawling toward us.

“Bairaji stones!” Kellen cursed loudly after a moment, getting our attention.

All three of us backed away hoping to be out of reach soon, but the creature’s body just kept stretching.  Then I remembered the lightning speed and expandability the things possess when they’re within range to strike.

“Run!” I yelled.  

And we turned to run just as a tentacle shot toward us.

It barely missed Kellen’s foot and buried itself in the ground.

I turned to look as I ran and saw stingers start to form down the arm that was stuck.  

Then I saw several more tentacles speeding toward us.

After a couple more close calls, we were finally out of range and back to the portal to Adyskia.  

We quickly went through and collapsed on the other side.  As I lay on the ground panting, I raised my arms and started to absorb the energy out of the portal to release it back to where I had borrowed it.

A few moments later, the portal was fully closed and I collapsed back down.

The three of us didn’t move.  We just lay there, squinting in the light of our yellow colored sun and trying to slow our breathing.

“I’m sorry,” Maedi whispered.  

I turned and sat up to look at her.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” Kellen said.

“I nearly got us killed,” she said, even quieter than before.

“Nah,” I said. “We’ve gotten out of worse than that.  ‘Sides, what’s life without a bit of excitement, eh?”  

Mae smiled weakly.  “I guess we know we’re not battle ready, huh?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I didn’t even think to use my Raiken to fight them off.  I just ran.”

“Neither did I…”

Kellen looked serious for a moment.  “Alright, come on,” he said.  “Or we’ll be late for supper.  And we need to clean ourselves up a bit or someone will suspect we’ve been up to something.”

Mae and I nodded and the three of us stood to head back.

Checking You Out

[<10 min. read, 2.3k Words -- Mall!Johnny x Mall!Ten x Female Reader -- Smut. -- MMF Threesome, Exhibitionism (sort of?), Some Dom/Sub Themes, Otherwise Pretty Vanilla]

[H&M Clerks Johnny & Ten based off these posts and for anon.]

You almost never went shopping after your shift, opting instead to go home and rest your tired feet. However, today you got off earlier than usual given your rare opening shift, and now you were much too alert and active to go home already. Ergo, retail therapy. You strolled into stores you usually never had time to go into, including the too trendy H&M downstairs clear on the other side of the mall. Your heels clicked on the shiny and scuffed linoleum as you browsed the racks, pausing to inspect a cute top when you heard a snicker behind you. You turned, raising an eyebrow as you tried to locate the culprit. Sure enough, behind you, a petite clerk was organizing a display and trying to hide his bemusement.

“Excuse me?”

He looked up, even more amused with your indignant stance with your hand on your hip. “Who, me? Nothing.” You tentatively turned back to continue shopping. “It’s just cute how you think that’d be cute on you.” He quietly quipped behind you. You reeled back around as a taller clerk interrupted him.

“Ten, don’t be a dick. Then people don’t buy things and you don’t make money. There’s a food chain here.” The mysterious stranger smoothly swooped in, unclipping Ten’s badge and putting it on a high shelf where he couldn’t reach it. Ten hopped for it a couple times, uselessly swiping his hands towards it before grabbing the shepherd hook and fishing it down.

“Shh,” Ten stage whispered, “She won’t know I’m flirting if you blow my cover.”

“By negging?” The taller clerk gawked exaggeratedly. “Ah, duh, I forgot people get all creamy when you say they dress badly.” You smirked gratefully at this cute stranger. “She is pretty, though.” He laughed, watching you blush.

“Who are you maniacs?” You gawped.

Your handsome flirt piped up, right on cue. “I’m Johnny. The gremlin is Ten. We’ve never seen you around before so you excited him.”

“Oh. I work at Michael Kors upstairs.”

Ten rolled his eyes. “Of course she does.” He stepped forward, taking your stunned hand and inspecting it. You mistakenly thought he was admiring your bracelet at first. “The shoes say mortgage but the nails say rent-a-center, the calling card of every Kors girl.” You snatched your hand back as he cackled. For some reason you were insanely fascinated by both of them, even Ten the literal monster. You wanted nothing more than to smother the smirk off his face.

Johnny had magicked behind you in this confrontation. It’s like they were circling prey. “We get off in half an hour, if you’re interested.”

“Do you get off very often?” You deadpanned.

“Five days a week, in fact.” He was quick. Your ankles turned to jelly for a second.

“'We?’”

Johnny nodded. “We’re best friends. We share everything.”

What the hell, you figured. It’d been a hot minute since you’d last been laid, and you couldn’t deny how charming Johnny was. Even Ten, in all his actual evil, was pretty beautiful himself. They told you where to meet them when they clocked off.

You found yourself in the cold employee lot on the bottom floor of the underground parking garage, huddled into yourself behind an old but pristine SUV. You couldn’t help but notice the backseats folded down and a few blankets and pillows laid out – a real cuddle bucket. Hearing a boisterous laugh, you turned to see your dates for the evening strutting over, Ten’s arm looped through Johnny’s.

“You came!”

“Not yet.” You quipped, relishing their cringe at the cheesy comeback.

“Our pickup rate is about 75% in a good month," Johnny lamented. "A good chunk of people think they’ll wind up dead in a proposition like this.”

“Worth it, I’d say.” Dropping any amount of pretense, you bravely took your first step towards Ten, who looked like like he’d been buzzing with desire since he came down here. He was suddenly bashful as you stroked his fringe away from his eyes, your fingertips tracing his jaw and giving him a chance to decline before you leaned in to kiss his lips.

The kiss was modest but passionate, rendering Ten speechless for a moment as he pulled away. He had let go of Johnny as some point and wrapped his arms around you instead. “I like her,” he laughed breathlessly to Johnny, “she’s fun.”

Johnny eagerly leaned in between yourself and Ten, capturing your lips in a kiss of his own and earning very different groans from both of you in the process as he scooped you out of Ten's hands. Ten huffed and reached into his canvas bag for the car keys to beep the backdoor open. Giving you a boost, Johnny earned a simultaneous moan and yelp out of you as he helped you hop back into the car. You playfully reached forward, grabbing the collar of his shirt and pulling him in on top of you as you scooted your way back away from the door in an effort to let Ten climb in after you both. Johnny kissed along your jaw and throat, his lips following his fingers as he unbuttoned your blouse and let it fall open. Ten shrugged off his cardigan, folding it nicely and dropping it along with his bag into the front passenger seat before climbing between your legs. He leaned down, sucking a sweet bruise onto your waist as his slender fingers traveled under your skirt, coming away with your skimpy panties that had already started to grow damp.

"Ten, lick me," you panted. He almost looked offended.

"What makes you think I want--" Ten was interrupted by the sole of your high heel rubbing against his erection, surprising him into moaning loudly.

"Because your mouth says bitch but your moans say eager." You smiled evilly at Ten's shock before you turned your attention to Johnny, who had rolled to your side to watch. "Is he a sub?" You asked.

"Good observation. What gave it away?"

"Anyone that antagonistic either thrives off punishment or is woefully ignorant."

"Fair enough. Ten," Johnny playfully commanded, making him perk up in attention, "she said lick. Now lick." Ten huffed but nonetheless leaned down to nuzzle his lips against your impatient pussy. You wondered momentarily if you had been too forward, but were soon reassured by Ten's content moans as he swiped his tongue along your folds. An intruding pair of lips on your breasts distracted you from Ten hungrily eating your pussy, and you looked to see Johnny just as hungrily lick and nibble on your perked nipples, his hands busy freeing his cock from his jeans and stroking himself. The sight of his hard cock standing at attention immediately filled you with desperate desire and you pulled Johnny closer, maneuvering him up onto his knees near you so you could get your waiting mouth around him. Though he had been watching you intently, Johnny still let out a groan of near surprise at how deep and hard you decided to take him, his fingers softly tugging you off of him by a fistful of your hair so he could admire how pretty you looked when you got sloppy. With Johnny's hands tangled in your hair and your hands in Ten's, it was easy to keep this up until you felt your first orgasm fast approaching. Unable to get much warning yourself, you were barely able to alert Ten before gripping his hair tightly and grinding yourself hard against his tongue as you had a screaming orgasm, your whole body trembling as you clutched onto Johnny.

You were hardly out of the haze of your orgasm when you felt Johnny desperately manhandle you as gently as he could onto all fours. He fumbled with the condom in his fervor, nearly snapping it onto his length and cursing at the sting on his sensitive organ before rubbing it up against your recovering pussy. He sweetly ran his hands from your shoulders to your hip as he took his time easing you onto him, groaning as he felt your pussy's residual throbs around him. Once he was sure he was comfortable inside you and not about to break you, his grip on your hips noticeably tightened as he began to bounce you back against his cock. Ten watched, turned on and stroking himself before pulling you into a kiss. He rose, sitting back on his heels and wiping his mouth clean on the back of his hand before letting his cock spring free from his pants. You wrapped your fingers around his length, teasingly tugging him close by his hard-on and relishing the whine that escaped him before you leaned down and closed your lips around him. Ten and Johnny both groaned as you took them at the same time, using Johnny's thrusts to help you bob your mouth up and down on Ten's leaking cock. You snuck a look up at Ten from under your eyelashes and his lips ticked up into a smile. He stroked your hair out of your eyes, tucking a stray strand behind your ear before locking eyes with Johnny. "She feels so fucking good, doesn't she?" He breathed hard, trying with difficulty to fight off getting too aroused.

Johnny gripped you tighter, his other hand snaking into your hair to hold onto it. "Yeah she does," he smirked before erupting into more moans as your pussy rubbed a sweet spot on his cock. "Oh, shit," he groaned, "Not yet, I wasn't done wit -- oh, fuck --" Johnny's arms circled your waist, pulling you off Ten and into his arms as he pumped into you and filled the condom. His plush lips tenderly kissed your neck as he came down off his high and collapsed back onto his ass, dragging you down back against his chest. "Ten," he commanded gently again, "get down here. I want to watch you finish her off." He snapped the condom off and tossed it aside for now before making sure your pretty breasts were on full display again. His fingers traced down the gentle slope of your chest, playing with your nipples again as Ten rolled down his own condom and climbed in between your legs once more. He hungrily nibbled and bit into your neck as he pushed into you, his thrusts markedly more sensual and slow than Johnny's.

"He likes it when you talk him through it," Johnny whispered in your ear, before leaning forward and grabbing a hank of Ten's hair and pulling him forward for a kiss. You watched, somehow more aroused at watching their mouths wrestle, Ten's grateful and soft moans escaping from the stimulation. He nudged back, dipping back into your lips and whining as you snaked a hand up under his shirt to tease his nipples. Ten shuddered, his hips rolling firmly but gently against your core. Your free hand traveled down to rub your clit as you kept eye contact with Ten.

"That's it, baby, I love how you fuck me," you breathed, savoring how much whinier just talking made him. You continued multi-tasking, letting out a small yelp as Johnny's fingers walked down your tummy down to your core to replace yours. You rolled your hips up against his fingers and Ten's slender cock, moaning as you let both hands roam over his slim chest. "Your cock feels so sweet in me, Ten," you mewled, your fingertips brushing his alert nipples and making him shudder as he continued his steady pace. You were suddenly struck but the telltale ascent to climax. Johnny's fingers were really working a good rhythm with Ten's erection to send you into a second orgasm. Ten smiled almost affectionately as he noticed your eyes widen, your shallow breath growing even more ragged.

"Isn't that sweet," Ten groaned to Johnny, "I think she's going to cum for us again."

"She better. It's worth seeing twice. Make her cum, Ten."

"Make me cum, Ten." You echoed, clutching onto him. He sat up and reached to lift you by the ass, allowing you to grip around his hips as his cock angled right into your sweet spot. You cried out at the sensation, Johnny adjusting under you to make sure he could still reach your clit just fine and help you cum. "You're doing so good, baby," you cooed, "now cum with me." You rocked against Ten's thrusts, finally speeding up just enough to tip over the edge as he held tightly onto you, your own orgasm firmly squeezing his cock with your spasms.

You all finally took a second to breathe before untangling from each other. In turn, they each shared a sweet kiss with you as they helped you get dressed and gather your things. Johnny was first to climb out of the car, offering you his hand as you fought against your wobbly legs to safely exit. Ten reached for something in his bag before coming out to say goodbye, pressing the cute top you had been looking at back at the store into your hands.

"Awh," you teased, "a gift?"

"God, no," Ten laughed, "it's payment. You're a terrific escort. Rating you five stars on TripAdvisor."

You were about to get rude with Ten again just to push his buttons, but he surprised you with a friendly kiss to the cheek and a surprisingly cordial hug considering you all just fucked barely ten minutes before. Smitten, you couldn't help but give him a warm smile as you finished tapping your info into Johnny's phone. Johnny, ever the gentleman, gave you a kiss on the cheek as well, thanking you for a lovely evening and hoping you'll make this a regular enough thing. You traded final hugs for the night before waving goodbye, smiling contently as you crossed the lot to your own car. Now it was time to go home and rest.

Wishing Point Baltimore Maryland Wagner's Point and Fishing Point Renamed Wishing Point / Fishing Point

BUILDING around Citgo Petroleum CITGO Petroleum Corporation Gas company in Baltimore, Maryland Open 24hour 2201 Southport Ave, Baltimore, MD 21226 and other established businesses in the district and nature of the Area but its water front and We all have our General locations and sites I decided to include others then myself Business partners close dear to me loved ones and or people I work cooperatively with I know its some reason why it’s no A great location- Water Waste plant Citgo Petroleum company but I see potential and bettering in the Area

NO MALE OR FEMALE NOT XY OR XX RULES TO YALE SEX IS GENDER PEOPLE ARE SEX CALCULATED AND NUMB WITH A SENSE OF LOVE — COLD CALCULATED AND NUMB WITH A SENSE OF LOVE HAWKINS TRANSLATED TO HAWKIN Message from Philosopher Professor Doctor Field General Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins jr HAWKINS UMBRELLA CORPORATION COATS ACTIVE IN CASE TERRY LEE KAUFFMAN HAWKINS (via teremiah8403) WORDS WORDS poemswords - poemswords - sword and words YES=Y LIKE Y=YES ( N=NO OR NODACHI) (via blaze8403)YIN & YANG ? DAI GENSUI TSU TER PHILOPROFESSU MADOSIER ( ER IN EMPEROR AND BOOPER AND ( DOSSIER / DOSIER ( OSS OR OS ) DAI GENSUI TSU TERI MADOSIER GRAND MASTER GRAND MARTIAL MARSHAL FIELD DOCTOR GENERAL WAR OR WOR - RIGHT AND WRONG C=3 LIKE K=11=2 YAKAZA SOFT SEAT WAY WAR AND T IN TERRY AND H IN HAWKINS Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · TAO OF TRUE RELIGION CIRCLE — RavenDove - yin yin / yang - D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book.YORK PA - RESPONSIBLE RESPECTING EVERY SERIOUS PERSON ON NOW SERIOUS ISSUE BUT LISTEN ENTIRELY—OPERATIONS(TH OR AH) BOOP ( OOP=OO16=007 )—ENOCH PFL- COM01 TERRY HAWKINS - LEE ( RHEE )HIROHITO COULD SPELL BOOK AND BOOP - ER OR RE -KINGMAGIC YEA A GOD KNOW MAGICK - MAGI ?—PKA-TERRY THE TERROR MO IN HOME LIKE HOME PLATE ATE MODUS OPERANDI Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.— - THREE ELEVEN PISCES- OP IN OPERATIONS AND HOPKINS - ( OPP OR OSS - NO HOP OR POP - NOT SPOT STOP POST POTS - TOPS ?)—TERRY LEE HAWKINS - HOPKINS - AND JAPANESE HOKINSU -ME SIR NAMED A CHILD - DATE 10/29/30/2019 T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—LI LEE LEI OR RHEE - NAME LEE AMEN OR AMAN ? - THEY DIDN’T GET IT PHONETIC LETTER WARTERKEY SIX ( ROMAN 9) [email protected] TWITTER TJ - TERRY JUNIOR BIRTHDAY MARCH 11 USS OR USA ?CORRECT SELECTION THE GOD DELUSION - CHAPTER 7 - 3 MORE—XERXES ( SEX=GENDER ) XIEXIE ( I AND E VOWELS LETTER 9 & 5)OOP = 16= 7 OO7 / 2600 OR 1600 - 0016 (ACTIVE) JANIST OR JANISM ?Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins is feeling professional with professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · ALL PRO RAVENDOVE Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins was RavenDove - yin yin / yang RavenDove - yin yin / yang - COLD NUMB AND (LOVIEY DOVIEY) CALCULATED SPELL IT D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book BUT LOKI OR BOOPER SAN with Blaze Pascal. with Terry Lee Hawkins ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigami HAWKINS HOKINSU/HOKINZU — feeling professional with Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins JR ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigamI TER OR TERRY / - HAWKINS - LETTERS IN SPELLING DAI GENSUMMASIER RANK NATO 50 STARS -DAI-GENSUIER Professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. - Signed Boop not Book Rank‎: ‎TEN ( CODE_LOVE-AI)-star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-16 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-15 Next lower rank‎: GENSUIER GENSUIER - AMONG R&R AND SECURITY DETAIL Rank‎: ‎NINE ( CODELOVE-AI)-star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-15 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-14 Next lower rank‎: DAI GENSUIA DAI GENSUIA Rank‎: ‎Eight -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-14 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-13 Next lower rank‎: GENSUIA GENSUIA Rank‎: ‎Seven -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-13 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-12 Next lower rank‎: ‎ DAI GENSUi DAI GENSUI Rank‎: ‎SIX -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-12 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-11 Next lower rank‎: ‎Gensui Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.— - THREE ELEVEN PISCES- OP IN OPERATIONS AND HOPKINS - ( OPP OR OSS - NO HOP OR POP - NOT SPOT STOP POST POTS - TOPS ?)—TERRY LEE HAWKINS - HOPKINS - AND JAPANESE HOKINSU -ME SIR NAMED A CHILD - DATE 10/29/30/2019 T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—LI LEE LEI OR RHEE - NAME LEE AMEN OR AMAN ? - THEY DIDNT GET IT PHONETIC LETTER WARTERKEY SIX ( ROMAN 9)[email protected]/TWITTER TJ - TERRY JUNIOR BIRTHDAY MARCH 11 USS OR USA ?CORRECT SELECTION THE GOD DELUSION - CHAPTER 7 - 3 MORE—XERXES ( SEX=GENDER ) XIEXIE ( I AND E VOWELS LETTER 9 & 5)OOP = 16= 7 OO7 / 2600 OR 1600 - 0016 (ACTIVE) JANIST OR JANISM ?Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins is feeling professional with professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · ALL PRO RAVENDOVE Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins was RavenDove - yin yin / yang RavenDove - yin yin / yang - COLD NUMB AND (LOVIEY DOVIEY) CALCULATED SPELL IT D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book BUT LOKI OR BOOPER SAN with Blaze Pascal. with Terry Lee Hawkins ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigami HAWKINS HOKINSU/HOKINZU — feeling professional with Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins JR ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigamI GOD NAME LOKI PROFESSIONAL HAWKINS ( KAUFFMAN) TERRY L(via blaze8403)Modus Operandi - GOD OVER MONEY THE LIVES OF MEN AND WOMEN ABOVE MONEY - IN GOD WE TO TRUST - USDA * (MURDA)HONESTY / DISHONESTY - SIDNEY / DISNEY(MONEY-YENOM) (BECK OR BECH ?)—TERRY CHRISTIAN CHRISTEN ANGELOUS LEE KAUFFMAN HAWKINSWORD WORDS poemswords  poemswords -POME-OPME-(OPEM) YES=Y LIKE Y=YES ( N=NO OR NODACHI) (via blaze8403)YIN & YANG ?DAI GENSUI TSU TERI MADOSIER GRAND MASTER GRAND MARTIAL MARSHAL FIELD DOCTOR GENERAL WAR OR WOR - RIGHT AND WRONG C=3 LIKE K=11=2 YAKAZA SOFT SEAT WAY WAR AND T IN TERRY AND H IN HAWKINS Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · TAO OF TRUE RELIGION CIRCLE — RavenDove - yin yin / yang - D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book.YORK PA - RESPONSIBLE RESPECTING EVERY SERIOUS PERSON ON NOW SERIOUS ISSUE BUT LISTEN ENTIRELY—OPERATIONS(TH OR AH) BOOP ( OOP=OO16=007 )—ENOCH PFL- COM04 TERRY HAWKINS - LEE ( RHEE )HIROHITO COULD SPELL BOOK AND BOOP - ER OR RE -KING MAGIC YEA A GOD KNOW MAGICK - MAGI ?—PKA-TERRY THE TERROR MO IN HOME LIKE HOME PLATE ATE MODUS OPERANDI Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.— - THREE ELEVEN PISCES- OP IN OPERATIONS AND HOPKINS - ( OPP OR OSS - NO HOP OR POP - NOT SPOT STOP POST POTS - TOPS ?)—TERRY LEE HAWKINS - HOPKINS - AND JAPANESE HOKINSU -ME SIR NAMED A CHILD - DATE 10/29/30/2019 T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—LI LEE LEI OR RHEE - NAME LEE AMEN OR AMAN ? - THEY DIDNT GET IT PHONETIC LETTER WARTERKEY SIX ( ROMAN 9)[email protected] TJ - TERRY JUNIOR BIRTHDAY MARCH 11 USS OR USA ?CORRECT SELECTION THE GOD DELUSION - CHAPTER 7 - 3 MORE—XERXES ( SEX=GENDER ) XIEXIE ( I AND E VOWELS LETTER 9 & 5)OOP = 16= 7 OO7 / 2600 OR 1600 - 0016 (ACTIVE) JANIST OR JANISM ?Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins is feeling professional with Philosopher Professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · ALL PRO RAVENDOVE Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins was RavenDove - yin yin / yang RavenDove - yin yin / yang - COLD NUMB AND (LOVIEY DOVIEY) CALCULATED SPELL IT D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book BUT LOKI OR BOOPER SAN with Blaze Pascal. with Terry Lee Hawkins ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigami HAWKINS HOKINSU/HOKINZU — feeling professional with Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins JR ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigamI TER OR TERRY / - HAWKINS - LETTERS IN SPELLING DAI GENSUI TSU TERI MADOSIER -DAI GENSUMMASIER RANK NATO 50 STARS -DAI-GENSUIER Professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. - Signed Boop not BookRank‎: ‎TEN ( CODELOVE-AI)-star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-16 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-15 Next lower rank‎: GENSUIER GENSUIER - AMONG R&R AND SECURITY DETAIL Rank‎: ‎NINE ( CODELOVE-AI)-star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-15 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-14 Next lower rank‎: DAI GENSUIA DAI GENSUIA Rank‎: ‎Eight -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-14 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-13 Next lower rank‎: GENSUIA GENSUIA Rank‎: ‎Seven -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-13 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-12 Next lower rank‎: ‎ DAI GENSUi DAI GENSUI Rank‎: ‎SIX -star Non-NATO rank‎: ‎O-12 NATO rank‎: ‎OF-11 Next lower rank‎: ‎Gensui Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.— - THREE ELEVEN PISCES- OP IN OPERATIONS AND HOPKINS - ( OPP OR OSS - NO HOP OR POP - NOT SPOT STOP POST POTS - TOPS ?)—TERRY LEE HAWKINS - HOPKINS - AND JAPANESE HOKINSU -ME SIR NAMED A CHILD - DATE 10/29/30/2019 T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—T=20=2 E=5 R=18=9 R=18=9 Y=25=7 NOT G OR P—LI LEE LEI OR RHEE - NAME LEE AMEN OR AMAN ? - THEY DIDNT GET IT PHONETIC LETTER WARTERKEY SIX ( ROMAN 9)[email protected] TJ - TERRY JUNIOR BIRTHDAY MARCH 11 USS OR USA ?CORRECT SELECTION THE GOD DELUSION - CHAPTER 7 - 3 MORE—XERXES ( SEX=GENDER ) XIEXIE ( I AND E VOWELS LETTER 9 & 5)OOP = 16= 7 OO7 / 2600 OR 1600 - 0016 (ACTIVE) JANIST OR JANISM ?Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins is feeling professional with professor Doctor Dai Gensuier Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins Jr. · ALL PRO RAVENDOVE Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins was RavenDove - yin yin / yang RavenDove - yin yin / yang - COLD NUMB AND (LOVIEY DOVIEY) CALCULATED SPELL IT D or L Dove or Love maybe L or D Lover or Dover pythagorean numerology ABC123 Kauffman-Hawkins-Hawk or Hopk -H__kins aw or op and Hopkins signed Booper or just Boop not Book BUT LOKI OR BOOPER SAN with Blaze Pascal. with Terry Lee Hawkins ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Aisuru ikigami shinigami HAWKINS HOKINSU/HOKINZU — feeling professional with Terry Lee Hawkins Jr.Terry Lee Kauffman Hawkins Terry Lee Hawkins JR ( male ) Peros Dragonus Kami Loki Aisuru Ikigami ShinigamI GOD NAME LOKI PROFESSIONAL HAWKINS ( KAUFFMAN) TERRY L(via teremiah8403)Source:teremiah8403

Before I even begin this one, I’m going to say - don’t stress. Casting your first spell can be one of the most intimidating things when you’re first starting out on your path. The issue, I think, is that when we see spells or rituals in pop culture it can seem to be this massive thing. Perfect rhyming words, uncommon herbs with fancy names, 1700 candles that have been anointed by a High Priestess with sigils carved into them. However, like the rest of your path, performing your first spell doesn’t have to be spot on the first time, and believe me, it won’t. 

You will forget things. I did, and that’s okay.

You might find it odd. Again, totally fine! 

You might even decide half way through that you’re not happy with the way you thought you were going to perform the spell, or the way the books said to do it isn’t really your jam. 

All of the above is 100% okay.

To perform your spells, you don’t need the biggest crystal ball,  strangest sounding essential oils or an assortment of expensive tools. Use what you have at your disposal and what you feel comfortable working with. 

By the end of this post, I aim to get you feeling more confident in taking those first steps or giving it another go. 

Let’s start with the prep work. And yes, most spells will take some prep work. Of course, you can go for it on a whim when the fancy takes you, however, if you’re feeling like this is something you want to do, check in with your emotions first. What is it that is making you want to do the spell? Successful spells require a clear mind and calm. If you are angry, sad, overly excited, etc, it can throw the spell off balance. 

You’re going to need a pen and paper. Come up with a clear and concise statement in your mind that sums up EXACTLY what you want your spell to achieve. It is so important to make sure that your wording explains the purposes clearly. 

Think of a spell like a genie - if you don’t make the wish exactly as you want the results, the genie can find loopholes and you may not get the desired result. 

REMEMBER - MAGICK TAKES THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE. By this, I mean that Magick will find and follow the easiest route it can to bring what you have called out for into your life. 

For example, if you want to do a spell to bring in more money and it’s very vague, it leaves a lot of leeway. You could do the spell, and within 2 days to get a call from your manager that you’re getting a pay rise! FAB! However, you get 1p for more an hour. You’re bringing in more money, but 8p a day probably isn’t going to make much of a difference. You were thinking a little more than that right? 

When my friend and I do spells together, if we’re trying to draw in something, we always state that it harms none. We’re not Wiccan, but, we don’t want anyone to get hurt just so we can draw in a bit more dolla. Ya know? You can also add this in as well! 

You will also want to make a list of anything you want to use to enhance your spell. 

If you want to get really particular, you can research the best day to perform the spell you want to do and set a date with yourself to complete it. 

Assuming you’re ready to move forward straight away, you’ll want to gather everything you need and set the tone. If it is accessible to you, feel free to light some candles, dim the lights, put on whatever music on gets you calm and feeling magickal. Don’t feel like you need to be listening to a fantasy theme either. Although magickal, if listening to Lo-fi hip hop, trap or metal gets you in the zone, go with that. 

Your next step is going to be calling in the corners (also called Casting a circle). From here on out, it gets a little bit more experimental for you. I and many, many good books and give you a fantastic explanation of how to do this, however, as I’ve said above, eventually, you will find a way to make it personal and comfortable for you. The purpose of this step is to create a protective barrier around where you’re going to be making magick and to work with the assistance of the elements in your work. 

Starting with the east corner (this is how I’ve always learned but some also start with the north) work your way around clockwise calling in each of the elements. (Moving clockwise is associated with drawing thing in.) You can use your finger, athame or wand to draw this energetic circle or if it's more comfortable for you, you can visualize it in your mind. This is something I do personally and even like to visualize the element in action as I call in that quarter. For example, at each corner, I will picture the most incredible version of that element I can think of. For water, I picture a waterfall and lagoon, for fire, a volcano and so on. 

Tip - If you only have a small area you can do this, you only need to visualize the circle big enough for you to be able to sit comfortably in which any bits you’d gathered together. It doesn’t need to be a whole room. 

Element and correspondences: 

Air - East - Yellow - Feather/ incense -  Sylphid

Fire - South - Red - Candle flame - Salamander

Water - West - Blue - Water - Undines

Earth - North - green - Salt/ crystals - Gnomes

Note - Casting a circle in this way isn’t everyone's jam. However, it is a great starting point and habit to get into, which as I said can be adjusted to suit the person casting in the future. Check out my post of casting a circle for full details on the above step.

When you feel a connection to each of the elements and your circle, physically or mentally drawn in complete take 3 deep, cleansing breaths to calm your mind and release any tension you might be holding. Giving yourself some time to the center is super helpful when performing spells, especially if you're new to it. 

Now, you’re ready to start your spell. Try and follow this as you’ve planned it, however, please don’t stress if you realize you forgot something and have to step out of the circle to grab it. You can use your wand, athame, fingers or visualization to create a vertical “cut” in the circle to step through, sealing it behind you if you need to step out and repeat this to step back in. It’s incredibly important that if something doesn’t go quite as you expected it to, that you’re not hard on yourself about it. Not only is this just good practice for your own personal self-care, but it will also help you keep you in that centered and steady-state of mind that is key for performing Magick. 

Once you’ve completed your spell, close the circle by releasing the corners, picture each of the elements freely moving away from you. Going anti-clockwise(anti-clockwise if associated with releasing/banishing), thanking any spirits, elemental, ancestors even just the universe. It’s always good to send a little thanks out into the universe. 

Before tidying away your things (if you have time to do so before) write down how you felt the spell went, how it made you feel, what you might do differently next time, what (if) you learned anything. If you’re in a position where you have to get you to spell things tidied away as quickly as possible so no one sees’s do this first, but then make time for writing. It’s just easier when it’s all super fresh in your mind. 

And there you have it, your spell is complete. The energy of the spell will continue to manifest itself and do its thing and all you need to do is take some time each day after the spell to focus on what it is you’re trying to draw in/ banish/ whatever it was. 

I Hope you’ve found something useful in this post. I had loads of fun writing it for you. 

Blessings, 

Ro x

precipice

Post In Hushed Whispers. ao3

Wind blew across Lake Calenhad, lifting the gulls higher, fluttering the sails of ships anchored in the harbour, and blowing through Eirlana’s hair. She shivered, despite the warm summer evening, and tugged her cloak tighter. Across the bay, easily visible from her perch atop a low wall, stood Redcliffe’s castle.

She tipped her tankard back and finished the last of her pint of mediocre ale. Shoulders sinking, she set it down beside her. She knew she should be preparing potions or writing a report to Leliana, but all she’d managed was walking to the tavern and leaving with a drink. And now, her limbs weighed too heavy to stand up and buy another pint. She ached all over, sore from overexertion and a dozen minor wounds. And yet, something other than fatigue kept her still.

Behind her, the tavern door creaked open and, for a moment, she heard Iron Bull, Sera, and Varric — evidently still playing Wicked Grace. At Varric’s invitation to join, she’d declined with a weak smile and “Another time.” He’d nodded, though the concern in his eyes remained.

“Where were you?”

She rubbed her forehead as it began to ache. Maybe she should’ve said “yes.” Maybe she could’ve ordered food and avoided getting buzzed from one drink. Maybe losing spectacularly at a human game would’ve been distracting enough to ignore the memories of her companions, aglow with lyrium-poisoning and dying.

“I ran out of arrows making them pay.”

She shivered again. No, it would not have been enough.

The tavern door opened again and, after a moment’s pause, someone approached.

“Mind if I join you?”

Eirlana twisted around to see Dorian, holding two fresh pints. She patted the space beside her, then held both tankards while he hopped up.

They drank in silence, watching fishing boats return for the night and trying to steer their gazes away from the castle.

“This world is an abomination. It must never come to pass.”

I know. I know. The Breach so massive it had swallowed the sky and allowed bellanar’an to bleed through. Demons everywhere. Red lyrium in the walls, the dead, and the living. The sickness horridly loud in their voices and horridly bright in their eyes.

“Kaffas.” She glanced at Dorian to see his gaze fixed on the castle. “I knew Alexius was desperate, but that….”  He shook his head. “What will happen to him, do you think?”

“He’ll return with us to Haven. After that, I don’t know. I…I’m sorry.”

Blurry in her peripheral, he turned toward her. “You don’t?”

“Why would I?”

When she looked at him, he raised an eyebrow. “You’re their leader, are you not?”

She swallowed, the ale suddenly tasting worse than salt water. “Not that I’ve been informed, no."

“Perhaps not officially.”

“I’m not.”

“You offered those Circle mages an alliance — a decision which several of your companions disagreed with, I noticed.”

And no one had argued. Yes, Bull had grumbled, Sera had griped, and Cassandra’s lips had thinned to one, near-invisible line. But no one had intervened, or tried afterward to convince her to reverse her decision.

She clutched her tankard, fingertips rubbing back and forth against the dented metal. “No doubt they’ll regret it,” she said, then realized she’d spoken to herself more than Dorian.

He snorted, ignorant of or ignoring her slip. “And choose to take your place? I doubt that.”

She knew, with an uncomfortable feeling in her gut, that he was right. None of her companions had shown any desire to lead the Inquisition, while their spymaster, ambassador, or commander could not afford to. Even disregarding the full-time duties of those titles, none of them paired well with the exposure of leadership — Leliana couldn’t manage her networks efficiently if she stood at the forefront, as much as Montilyet couldn’t simultaneously handle politics or Rutherford an entire army.

That leaves me. The gods-damned Herald of Andraste. She set her tankard down with a clatter. At Montilyet’s advice, she hadn’t yet denied that title, and at her own desire, hadn’t affirmed it. It didn’t matter. The hostility townsfolk once watched her with had shifted to something far heavier, something bordering on awe, and with every person saved or demon slain, those looks shifted farther. Within the Inquisition, too — agents in the field offering help at every turn, her colleagues turning to her during war councils. And her companions, who deferred to her, who stood by despite their disapproval.

Deshanna would be proud, she knew with sudden certainty. What else have I trained for for fifteen years but to lead?

But Clan Lavellan, not an Inquisition. Not something so vast. Not something with so many pieces. Not something with that horror waiting if we fail. I can’t — She dropped her head into her hands, unbound hair spilling over her shoulder. Her stomach churned and the Anchor throbbed. Demons. An army of demons massive enough to conquer Thedas. How do I stop that from happening? How do I stop any of that future from happening? How do I stop this? How do I stop —

Warmth blossomed between her shoulder blades. She stiffened, then registered the slight weight of a hand.

“Deep breaths. You’re okay.”

She inhaled shakily, thoughts tumbling on. I can’t lead the Inquistion. Someone else must. I won’t be enough. I’m never —

“Eirlana, breathe. Focus on the heat.”

At the sound of her name, a sound she hadn’t heard in months, her thoughts dissolved.

“Breathe.”

Focusing on the magicked heat moving slowly, back and forth, between her shoulders, she inhaled and exhaled deliberately.

I can’t lead — Jaw tight, she squashed the thought.

She timed her breaths with the movement of Dorian’s magic — inhaling as it swept left and exhaling as it moved right. Gradually, as the sunlight dimmed, her panic ebbed.

She slumped further, elbows resting on her knees. “Thank you.”

He squeezed her shoulder before drawing his hand back. “Are you all right?”

She straightened and nodded. Left hand in her right, she squished her palm between thumb and fingers to dull the pain through pressure. “We’re lucky. We know what this Elder One is planning. Now we need a plan to stop them.”

“‘Lucky’ isn’t quite the word I would have chosen, but I’m with you.”

She blinked at him. “You’ll join the Inquisition?”

“You thought I’d want to sit out the apocalypse?” He grinned. “Not a chance.”

“Good,” she said, picking up her tankard and tapping it against his. “I’d hate to lose my time-travelling partner.” She didn’t say, you’re the only other person who’s seen what will happen if we fail.

“Let’s avoid getting stranded again, yes? As monotonous as the South is, I much prefer ‘rustic and boring’ to ‘blighted and nightmarish.’”

She snorted. “I promise, nothing about this will be boring.”

He sighed. “You’re overlooking the weeks of walking it will take to get anywhere from this backwoods village of yours.”

She laughed softly, only faking it halfway. “We do have horses.”