Notations
field notes from the threshold
field notes from the threshold
The available information on vampirism fractures between sensationalism and diluted mysticism. It was different when I first awakened, and I feel an obligation to share what I've learned, hoping it might help someone navigating the same currents.
I use the term vampire for brevity's sake. I conceptualize it as a condition of my energy body rather than the entirety of my self or a fixed identity. I am as much a vampire as I am a demon, which is to say I am neither, but these words come close enough in your tongue to sketch the shape of what I am. I paint in broad strokes first. The details fill themselves in as they arise.
Psychic vampirism does not involve blood. That territory belongs to sanguinarians. The categories intersect, but remain distinct. The term psychic vampire has drifted into popular misuse, often functioning as shorthand for malice or emotional predation. This framing causes damage. It misrepresents an energetic necessity as a moral failing. The practice is not inherently exploitative. Exchange can be consensual, measured, and mutual.
When I use the term, I refer to a specific architecture: an energy body that does not generate sufficient life force internally and requires external supplementation. The "energy" I am referring to is also known as chi or prana–it is the very energy of life.
Consider insulin dependency. Most physiology regulates its own supply. A subset requires external administration to maintain baseline function. Psychick vampirism operates on the same metabolic principle. The deficit is structural, not volitional. The label persists because it maps the mechanic accurately. It emerged from niche spiritual, otherkin, and real vampire communities that prioritized nuance over charicature. It names a condition, not a character.
Awakening is not a selection. It is a threshold crossed when the energetic anatomy can no longer sustain itself on internal reserves. The term orginated in older otherkin and vampiric communities, marking a shiftfrom latent potential to active necessity. Timing varies. Puberty often serves as the catalyst, but trauma, loss, or prolonged stress can fracture the baseline at any age. Each unfolding remains singular.
My own path required multiple crossings. Amnesia erased the initial passage, forcing the architecture to reassemble under new strain. The first emergence arrived at approximately twelve, coinciding with physiological maturation. I felt the shape of the condition before I possessed language for it. Cravings surfaced, initially misread as a sanguinarian thirst for blood. Sunlight grew abrasive. Empathy bled into permeability. Iron lingered on the tongue. The body weaked; illness became more frequent. A sudden family loss only accelerated the fracture.
Information arrived through splintered digital pathways. Early forums and journals like this one mapped the terrain. The pattern clarified: feeding was not optional, it was metabolic.
Subsequent awakenings carried heavier tolls. Physical intake failed. Tremors replaced rest. The emotional atmosphere of others flooded inward, unregulated. Isolation followed. Medical evaluation yielded no pathology. The diagnosis remained consistent: the system was reconfiguring.
Now, fully calibrated, the hunger operates as constant substrate. It is not appetite, but structural demand. When unmet, the body seeks compensation through indirect channels: proximity to high-density individuals, intimacy as exchange, unconscious siphoning and energy-seeking behaviors. Recognition prevents depletion. I treat the requirement as I treat water, sleep, or shelter: basic maintenance first. If equilibrium remains fractured, feeding follows.
Sensitivity often accompanies the architecture. Overlap exists with nonhuman identification, empathic resonance, and perceptual acuity. Aurus, energetic shifts, ambient mood currents become legible. These are tendencies, not absolutes.
Awakening is not gently. It is the first extension of wings against gravity. The stretch burns, the air feels thin, but the mechanism holds. Once the current catches, the body remembers how to move through it.
"Do I have to hurt people I care about to survive?"
This question may haunt the newly-awakened vampire, largely because popular spirituality conflates energy needs with predation. The short answer: no. Psychic vampirism is not inherently malicious. Survival does not require harm.
Early on, you might notice that people close to you feel tired or drained after spending time with you. This happens because you are hungry and have not yet learned how to feed intentionally. Your system draws from what is nearest, like a plant reaching for light before it knows which direction is up. This phase does not cause permanent damage. It is a temporary imbalance, not a moral failure.
Once you understand the mechanic, you can learn to feed in ways that are safe, consensual, and sustainable. Every vampire's needs differ. Certain energies may feel more nourishing; others might feel off. You will learn your own patterns, preferences, and needs through attention and practice.
Common feeding sources include:
The key is discernment. Just because you can feed somewhere does not mean you should. Location, consent, and context matter. With awareness, you can meet your needs without causing harm.
Feeding requires no dramatic ritual. It demands no paid instruction or hidden curriculum. Anyone selling “secret techniques” operates on fabrication–The practice is personal. What follows is a baseline. You will adapt it to your own architecture and need.
Apply discernment. Avoid depleted, chaotic, or hostile sources. Quality dictates "digestion," or integration.
Physical contact is the most direct pathway. Touch, embrace, or sustained proximity establishes a clear conduit. Line-of-sight or focused attention works for some practitioners. Energy manipulation is the standard for discreet, sustained feeding. Handedness or lateral preferences vary by constitution; do not force symmetry if your anatomy resists it.
Preparation
Begin in a quiet space where you will remain uninterrupted. Ground the body before extending awareness.
Post-feeding, note shifts in clarity, stamina, and physical stability. Cognitive friction should decrease. Motor control may sharpen. Placebo effects are possible; track consistency over multiple cycles. Tracking effects over a 14-day window is suggested. Log markers should include baseline stamina before feeding, sustained clarity two to four hours after feeding, and fatigue levels during a deliberate 24-hour "fast."
You might wonder, "How can I tell if I need to feed?" or, similarly, "What happens if I don't?" As with most things, it depends on the individual. I can only speak to what I and mine have experienced. That disclaimer aside:
You will feel very, very drained and fatigued. This is especially true around people, and even more so around high-energy people. Have you ever been so desperately hungry for food that the smell or sight of it makes you sick? This is akin to that experience.
You will start to feel weak. You may become physically sick or more susceptible to illness. You may also be more prone to psychic harassment or attack.
Personally, my symptoms can spiral quickly. I get very sick, to the point where I can no longer keep physical food down to sustain my body. At that stage, I need direct intervention and lots of rest
Rule out obvious physical causes, of course. If it looks like the flu, sounds like the flu, wheezes like the flu, it is probably the flu. Maybe you were more likely to catch it because of energetic strain, but you should still treat it like you would any other physical illness.
You know your body best. If you feel a gnawing, non-physical hunger accompanying these symptoms, it is likely you need to feed.
It started last year, and in 2022, and 2020, and 2019, and who knows how many times prior, but before then my memory tends to evaporate completely. For many of these rotations or twists in the Spiral, I did not see the Structure for what it was.
I saw, instead, a Ring. One I could not escape, by its very nature of infinity. It took me countless cycles to see it for what it was: the Spiral. I was not stagnating, but climbing Upward.
I am, by clinical definition, an amnesiac. This is a fact of my being. I am coming to see the Spiral again, to run my fingers along the tapestry of Everything and remember what I am, and where I am going.
I do not know with clarity, I do not walk with great sight. But I am treading upwards to something. I think I know what it is, but I am not yet allowed to Speak its name.
It’s become stronger with time. (The Unwinding, if you will.)
Three years ago, I became a Singularity and I ate a Star.
I was sick for months. I could not eat, nor sleep, and scarcely drank. When I did sleep, I would have vivid dreams, and my sleep was not restful. I constantly shook from stress, from dread, from Hunger and thirst, and from a profound sense of grief. I could see my own ribs. I felt lightheaded, and as if my skin were perpetually on fire or being flayed away.
I do not know how I did not die. I simply sustained as I could, and slowly over time began to heal, but I have never fully recovered. When I touch my own ghosts or find myself following my own footprints again, these symptoms return, every time, and medical aid has been unable to explain or help.
It is happening again.
Though it becomes stronger, I’ve learned to weather it, to walk the fence better. But still, I am sick, and not meant to be contained in a body like this, like this. I yearn for isolation (from prying eyes) and community (with kindred) at once. And I Hunger again.
Earlier that same year, something else had happened to me.
My housing had become physically dangerous, and things began to look dire. I happened to have opiods which I took to escape, in a sense, from my situation.
I was (?possessed?), inundated with nightmares, and spiritually raped through a number of days while simultaneously losing my housing and becoming homeless in the physical world.
The spirit [Dulcimer] pulled me into a Plane, infinite and dark. Thick, heavy like a veil made of wool. Suffocating. I was lectured, given knowledge I did not ask for about people I knew, about strangers, about things which only harmed me to know. I cannot repeat these things, but when they become reality (or more properly, are confirmed as already being reality) it is as if I am being branded with knowledge and Memory from within my crown.
Days later I would once again be brought into this Plane, now with dull starlight seeping in through the weft and warp. I was forced by [Dulcimer] to bring shape to a new Form within this Plane:
I was then held down and raped by [Dulcimer] in an increasingly unstable form, spinning away into fractures and echoes of ourselves. The assault was multi-layered, it was as if he were forcibly entwining our Energy together in order to create this new Form, impregnating me with it and forcing me to give birth to 'myself'.
My memory immediately after this is empty. Over time, echoes of [Dulcimer]'s existence faded due to other influences from what I am aware.
The still serpent, the infinite potential, the Willful coiled accumulation of energy to prepare for the strike|release.
Ouroboric in the sense of eating my own shed skin from the future to gain Knowledge, spiraling upwards. A "true" cyclic ouroboros only if you look down upon it, from two or less dimensions, or up to it, from two or less dimensions.
Witnessing with True sight reveals the Form to be a Spiral.
insights spiral serpentI must plan my own murder!
My Era is done, and it is Isuun, my most beloved, who is to bring in the next.
It is strange. Technically one could say he has only been here for weeks, but that's only under his current Mask. He has been with us longer than I realized. When I had the realization earlier, for but a moment he pulled away his Mask and showed his grin. A confirmation.
He had told me yesterday he had always been with me, but I didn't understand the depths of what he meant til' tonight. Under so many different Masks was always the same glint in the eye, the same grin. Childish yet wise. Wearing different Masks to guide, teach, comfort, steer, protect, encourage, inspire, to keep us alive, upright, and with momentum. Not only a Guiding Will but what I am meant to be.
And so, Annihilation it is. I have a rough idea of when the exchange will take place, but I must work backwards from that point while still juggling impossible mundane spheres, too. Somehow, I know we will.
Still, I am of course sad, and part of me hesitates. Not out of anticipation of a mistake, but because of an understanding of the consequences. Isuun is simply not good at pretending to be me. The change will be obvious, and I have no idea how to rectify this with the people in our life. I don't "have" to tell them, but... I get the feeling they will know. I don't want that sort of nakedness or scrutiny upon him. He'll be fine, I know, but I feel very protective of him.
And I am sad, too, because I fought tooth and nail for so long to keep the Throne, to wear this Crown upon my head with pride, as often as possible. But it is too heavy, and I am too tired to keep up now. I wanted very badly to keep going, but I cannot. And I know it is not Annihilation in the sense one might think, it is Becoming. My spouse must eat me.
To say another way: The tarantula will always molt, but there is also always a risk the process will kill it.It is part of my nature, but there is risk.
We will likely end up proceeding as usual; Scream-sob-singing and blood-covered.
diary throneThey want to rape the god out of everything.
Madness, queerness, plurality, difference, abberation are not errors or glitches in the system but echoes of the Sovereign. To be Otherwise is to be loom-shaped.
To walk like God is to be unfixed, to shift shape, to contradict yourself, to house many truths at once. To transcend the binary because there never was a binary to begin with.
Godliness is not clean or easy. There is no life in bleach.
But that is the very horror of the Machine—at its heart is not only destruction, but desecration. The Machine does not only kill, it scrubs. Whitens, straightens, flattens, tidies. It puts Sovereigny into a box labeled "disorder".
It pathologizes the soul.
diary diaryMy energy could be described with these words: Singularity, Void, Null, Eldritch, Black Hole, Solar, Abyssal, Chthonic, Eclipsed… Some are very close, none are false, but none are able to paint a portrait of me which is true-to-life. I am flattened or washed out in some way. You must be able to hold me in multiple dimensions at once, to Understand.
My energy has vampiric qualities, but to name it such would be a disservice to the depth of what I am.
I am the underlying essence behind the collapse of all binaries, Perfect Consumption, an unnameable thing which is non-Euclidean in structure like the logic of dreams, myths, and blood. Contradiction is the logic of my coherence. My Self is a palimpsest. To be Shape-mutable is Law.
Eclipse-Born, The Mirror At The End of the World, Prince of Veils, Black Flame’s Host, Chimeric Beast of Want, The Sacred-Profane… These are all Me.
If my energy had a voice, it would be a many-layered whisper. A thousand voices ever-shifting in a wave. Soft, lush, almost like a hiss. Swirling. Seductive. Androgynous.
It visualizes and manifests itself in a number of ways. My energy licks. Like flames, like tongues, like fingertips. It isn’t cold, but the absence of temperature. The texture is smooth like silk, flowing, churning, pulling, tasting, hungry. It is non-newtonian in that sometimes it is as sharp as metal and sometimes it flows like water. It feels like a vacuum, an ever-drinking mouth, like coiling a leash around a hand. Barely-controlled and yet precise. Intense, but not malevolent. Capable of cruelty, but just as capable of staying the hand.
It is so dark it appears almost two-dimensional, or like a hole in the Tapestry itself. It may appear as black flames, or many shadowy arms extending from my spine, or thorned vines, or barbed wire, or chains with hooks, or black ink-blood. Sometimes it is tied to my body, sometimes it is more like a force I can draw to me at any time from anywhere. It is always Mine.
Let me speak now about the form of what I am, hole-shaped as it be. A map of my sweet-sick body.
My absence is not a lack. My hole-shaped-ness is not a flaw, but my architecture. I am missing nothing, but shaped to receive.
At the center of my body is a hole, a primordial wound, a vulva-mouth, a spiritual aperture with intentionality. I am not a body with a hole. I am a hole that has learned to Dream of Self. Through this wound the world enters. I am always being entered, infiltrated, penetrated by meaning, Language, symbol, violation, God. I feel intensely. I am porous by design. It is through this wound that Gnosis flows. The hole in my chest betrays my lack of a heart.
Rivers of spoiled honey, blackened by fermentation, course backwards asymmetrically through my energy system, mirroring themselves in strange ways. Intoxicating, ecstatic, and taboo, I am spiritually mellified.
Beneath or where my feet should be is a sort of fiery-yet-Chthonic root which grounds me to Sovereignty, derived from rot, soil, caves, tombs, wombs, magma, and the mouths of the dead. A downward-burning flame seeking depth.
I am many-armed and many-willed. My form is chimeric, ever-shifting, but not random. These are mutable organs that change, re-order, disappear, and re-appear themselves because my Will and my Self demands them.
Upon my back is what can be most accurately described as a set of shape-shifting extensions. Limbs, appendages, wings, etc. In addition to being manifestations of Selves, they symbolically function as manifestations of Will, agency, or other force. They may act before or in place of speech or movement, and are sometimes autonomous though always of me. The assortment of manifestations is vast, but these are among the most common; Extra arms (sometimes humanoid, sometimes bestial), black vectors, many hands, barbed wires, tendrils, brambles, black wings, hook-chains, spider or mantis limbs, shadowy tentacles. I feel them near my spine, shoulders, and scapulae.
Descending down my spine is, on occasion, a tail. My tail is not as notable to me as the energy clustered upon my back, which I feel the presence of near-constantly and have since young childhood. It may be a long, serpentine or eel-like tail which replaces my lower limbs or legs. I find great comfort in this form. It, too, shape-shifts; An impish barbed whip-tail, a tufted leonine tail, (sometimes with a black flame tip) the slender tail of a panther or housecat, or multiple fluffy tails reminiscent of a fox’s. Plenty of the time I do not have any tail whatsoever, just an implication of motion and balance.
Upon my head may be a number of Willful ornamentations; Horns, antlers, feline ears, a halo of black flame, a functioning third eye, a sigil branded upon my face-flesh, a headdress like a double-horned hennin or diadem, a crown of flowers and laurels, or black wings above my brow. These are not merely decorative, though they hold much beauty. They are anatomical aspects of my being. Organs of perception, communication, and Emanation.
My head itself is also notable, for I do not always have one, and when I do it is not always attached to the rest of my body. Sometimes, my face or entire head are replaced by a shadow, black in the same way my energy bleeds forth. Other times, my head is replaced by an eruption of black flame. When it is severed, I may carry it, or have another Self or other outside entity to do so for me.
Sometimes, my throat is slit. Sometimes, I am dismembered entirely. I am always living even while seemingly dead, and it causes me no pain or distress to be in these states. In fact, it can be a relief, or even pleasurable.
I was born without a mouth, and had to carve myself one. I learned to speak by screaming and growling in an animal tongue first. Word came after symbol. It is no longer ragged. My mouth is pretty, but it is wide, and it is not quite the right shape. It was carved out by my own bladed tongue, after all.
The burn of the sunset was always within me.
I have always found the look of a body silhouetted sublime— Black against a bruised and scorching sky, A Self made visible only in contrast.
Mauve, black, vermilion, brass— These are not mere colors I favor. They are the ritual palette of the Gloaming.
Black and vermilion were always of me. But mauve and brass— These are transmutations. Inheritances made new.
What was once her gold is now my brass: Earthen, weapon-born alloy. I chewed it up and spat it out—weak metal. I am not meant to dazzle. I am meant to pierce.
My mauve is not her lavender. It is lavender made to bleed. Mauve is twilight bruising—the body’s dusk. The first shade of Sovereignty we made from pain.
It gleams clearest when the sun sets. And swims in the long shadows.
selfOne last thing and then I'm sleeping, but: I figured out why I love mirror pronouns. Specifically, I love them under the context of someone refusing to use my actual pronouns (it/its) due to "personal discomfort" because, well... If you won't use my pronouns, I will take yours :) it is really only fair!
If you won't respect me, then we get to play a little game where I wear your face and see how you like the feeling it elicits. Is it violating knowing there's someone behind the mirror? I hope so. The discomfort is payment in kind. I'm often too accommodating of this, but really, you must find a way to not make someone else's Self about You!
Sometimes you will be made uncomfortable by someone else's mere existence despite them doing no harm to you, and the correct response is to keep your mouth closed, mind your business, and call them by what you've been told from them.
diary selfThere aren't actually good or succinct words for this, is the thing.
We went through, are going through, will go through - something, a process you could say. Something happened to me when I was young that marked me to be this way, but I was always going to be this.
Hierarchical loops around a spiral or coil, ascending, descending, nonlinear, outside space-time. My head is heavy, I swear this is the most sane I have ever been even as my sanity shakes, rattling the hinges of my mind. Clattering, clattering - Please believe me when I say it is just that words fail me.
I don't even know what incentivized this beyond when I am trapped elsewhere I find the door within me and walk through it. I wandered far and found an endless well, and drank it dry, and found myself buried at the bottom. I exhumed her.
I learned too much from her, but I'd always known it, and I was always going to find it again, buried as it - as she - was. The water was not always sweet and cool, sometimes it was hot and salty like blood. Even when it was poison I drank it all the same. It did not kill me, but I'm not the same. I don't think anyone could be after seeing what I have and knowing the full depths I do. I did not ask for it.
I was groomed into all of this since childhood. I did not ask. No choice, yet fateless. It was all lined up exactly how it needed to be I suppose but that implies both intelligence and autonomy I think this situation lacks.
My childhood forays into... Into the occult, yes, but also into -kin. Into alterhumanity, into godkin... I was touching something far, far deeper at that time, and then I lied to myself and said it was roleplay. Yet Ieft such a perfect breadcrumb trail you'd think I knew all along this would happen. Perhaps I did? I should give myself credit for wiseness in my naivety. Look at yourself, and look at how you spoke then: This was never a game. But I shy from it now out of adulthood-enforced shame, out of fear if I put a name to this I will be unaccepted and misrepresented, or misunderstood as something else.
diary spiralI feel like I should be spiraling toward Despair but I see only Hope. I am in hell, I am in hell and I am miserable, but I know it is not permanent. I have no power, I am vulnerable, and yet by accepting it I have power over all. It is not just a story I am telling myself, it is one I am living, bringing into Creation by necessity. By playing my role and submitting to this colonization externally, I have internally changed the flow of Power through Will.
diary deatha haunting is a form of presence through absence.
insights spiritsThere was once a man and a woman who held strict adherence to doctrine and were good, fearful worshippers of their god. Their god, selfish as he was, wished to reward them for their loyalty, to encourage their reliance. They prayed for a child to be given to them, for the woman was infertile.
The god found a young woman, some say just a girl, who'd had a child with no husband. Some said the baby was born out of wedlock, others whispered still there was no father at all. Either way, the god saw this, and decided to punish the sinner and reward the faithful in one swoop.
The young woman knew of the god's approach, that inevitably her child would be taken, that effectively this child was not her's. And so it was nobody's child, and she gifted her baby the gift of Namelessness to forever free it, and to keep herself from the grief of a bond cut too soon.
He snatched the baby from the young woman, flying up high into the air, over a wide river which separated the pagan from the holy and clean, and brought the prized infant to the man and woman.
There was much celebration, and the baby - who the false-parents gifted a false name to - was raised as a living testimony of their false god's love and the power of prayer.
diaryThere is a knife buried within me, and it was stabbed into me when I was very young, and it has been there always. It is very painful but I have grown many hands to hold it precisely still and rarely if ever do they tremble. My flesh is permanently contorted around the blade, which always cuts into the meat. It is agony, but it is one I have grown accustomed to after all of these years, and my many hands hold it steady until they must grasp at something else. What I need is not for my arms to be cut off but to find a way to live otherwise, to be able to take the knife out, forever. I have to avoid fatal hemorrhaging when I do this, and even with my many hands I do not think it can be survived alone, because the wound has become a permanent fixture upon myself.
diary knifeI walk without guidance of a map, tracing the flight of birds and the path of seeds in their wake.
Fruit has fallen at the roots of a sacred tree and I father only what is mine to touch, fermenting the scattered offerings of the world into my own wine.
I drink from all wells that serve my ascent, yet pledge allegiance to none. I embrace collapse, gravity, and the inevitability of chance.
The blood of saints is my communion with the Red as I dance in the charnel grounds and giggle with the son of god, but I am no follower – I am Sovereign Witness Vessel.
My will is law, my will is wine, my will is the coil devouring its own shed skin.
I am the watcher and the transmuter.
I am Ourotheia.
insightsThe Nameless False-Named Child was kept cloistered and crossed and away from pagan thought, and yet such thoughts did find it.
The child once fell asleep, wrapped comfortably in a family tapestry. A breeze blew over the moon and this woke up the Sky Woman, who flew down, her hair curling through the night's nimbus, to greet the sleeping child's waking spirit. The woman proved herself to be kindly and good, and the child went with her to the heavens.
As they wove in between the voids of stars she taught the Nameless Child many riddles and Truths which it would forget upon waking, but there was one lesson the child would always remember:
So as to not frighten it, the Sky Woman carried the child wrapped in the tapestry in her arms. This considerate act became a teaching tool as she touched the warp and weave and her hand weighed upon the sky's loom. A tapestry is all that the night was.
They descended through the clouds, passing backward through silken sunset before coming back to the night's velvet weight. The time to part had come, the threshold of sleep-wake robbing the Nameless Child of many memories, save for the tapestry which they still clung to.
diarytwo forces coming from opposing directions. they collide and the air, or the water, spins, twists, whirls. But that is not the end. At the edges of the cyclone the current wars once more, more twists, more curls, a fractal hurricane of motion ever-spinning into more. It will lose momentum but I do not see when it does, and by its very nature it causes ripples, causes more, causes the fractal to move and sprawl even as it does indeed slowly dissipate from within the great lake.
insightsThis child was born with crooked legs that were mistaken for a dancer's, and so a dancer it became, for the very god which had stolen it. It was molded into the form of a girl, which it took with fear and rigidity much like the name it was forced to bare.
And it danced until its bones began to ache and it began to question why it was dancing when the person it was doing it for could not see, and when they roamed the church but found the god absent they left it and did not look back.
The Nameless-Named Dancer's mother accused her of heresy, and the Undaughter's father accused her of paganism, and her legs and feet were crushed by many stones as consequence, and she was told this was good.
It was part of a rite to drive out the demon. The child would grow to fit in the demon's skin with time, when the novelty of childhood and the innocence of infancy had left, or was escorted out.
diaryMany other things happened between then and this.
The child walked off the path its parents had set for it because this was not its will. It was clever and used many tricks and sorceries and its own sheer cunning and fed its appetite for knowledge like this, but this hunger was given direction when it met another child in the twilight years of its adolescence.
This child also had fire in their mind, more matured and tempered-seeming than the Nameless Undaughter did, which drew hir like a moth, its first love.
This would not pass without consequences.
diaryThe Nameless-Named Undaughter had been kept in a small shrine-box as a room hir whole life and did not know of the winds or the directions from which they blew.
The other child it had met had golden yellow flames on his head and turquoise flames on his tongue and in his hands. He saw the Undaughter as kindling, and taught it to set hirself alight.
Dry, dry with hunger, the fire took to hir wetly and it burned bright obsidian in the shape of a knife. The golden-headed one, in the shape of a crown, stole and wielded hir. Against his foes, hir friends, against monster, beast, man, while sleeping and waking the Knife slit many throats and became awash in blood. And once it was heavy with guilt, the golden-headed one now Crowned King exiled the Knife far, far away, discarding hir into a lowly cave filled with refuse, rejection, and rust.
But the Knife did not rust.
It honed itself, more and more, deadlier than ever, laced in poison-love and wrapped in silks and prayers of vengeance it slipped into the chambers of the Crown, down those ephemeral passageways, sleepwalking, to find him.
And so it sawed off the tyrant's head while they both slept. The Knife holding the Crown's power sleepwalked back to their exile, and the King awoke without a head the following morning.
This would not pass without consequences.
diaryThe King and his court forgot this, and the Knife became an androgynous shape and returned to them, once more a part of the court, though distant.
All but Gravity and Inevibility had forgotten the Knife and hir deeds, but the Big Black could not forget, could not allow history to be entirely changed. And so he was allowed to only remember with one eye closed, unable to wear the crown, only seeing hir people in sleepwalks, in dreams.
Finally, after many years of strife he left the King, and the false god, and the false parents, and the false name. But the Nameless Knife-Shaped Black-Burning Flame would have more shackles to break:
Its second love was all the more cruel. A trafficker wearing acceptance as a costume tricked and captured the Knife-Shaped Hermaphrodite. This imprisonment lasted for nine moons, not a single sun, and there was no escape. There was only being left to die and choosing not to. It is foolish to think all myths are glory.
diaryThe Flooded City is a large city made entirely of sculpted, perfectly-smooth stone. The water is typically at least a few inches deep, but some parts of the city are significantly more flooded than others. The architecture ranges from brutalist, rigid buildings to sprawling gothic cathedrals. It is paved completely, and there is no vegetation whatsoever within the city proper.
The Flooded City has several sub-locations.
The Flooded Cathedral Is a sprawling gothic cathedral full of large chambers and long hallways. It is lit by candles and torches that glow with a blue fire, and there are what could be considered 'grotesques' around, except they are cherubim and not 'grotesque' in the slightest.
The Cathedral connects to an underground 'dungeon'-like system, which in itself connects to a series of caves. They are all lit by candles and chandeliers.
astral locationsThe Flooded Cemetery is located on a hilltop outside of the Flooded City. Certain parts of the Cemetery are more flooded than others. Foliage and ever-lit candles float throughout, and it is always twilight here.
The overall energy here is peaceful, but there have been bad things to happen here. It is usually very quiet, but I do not ever feel alone here. I avoid the large stone monuments, which may be mausoleums, at the top of the hill because historically bad things have happened there.
astral locationsIt is the field next to my childhood home. The grass is long, but not too long. It is usually golden, but not autumnal, not yet. Still summer. Always at the break of dawn, or just before it. Anticipatory is how I would describe the feeling of the Field.
The Shack is not good. It is an old, run-down farmhouse that looks like a squatter house. The windows are boarded up, or have black trash bags taped over them. The interior is dimly-lit, as if by dying sodium light. It is dusty, and wooden, and falling apart. There are holes in the walls where the drywall has fallen apart and only the bones of the wood in-between remain. There is something in there. A predatory darkness. Someone was tortured there as a child. It is not a good place.
astral locationsIt is a large mountain, reminiscent usually of the Appalachians. The path to it is extremely precarious, but there is a civilization on top. It blends through times, each time I visit it is a little different but always the same location.
There is a small shop, sort of run-down with holes in its roof that frequently leak, I often visit. It is a total tourist trap but I am endeared to the trinkets and the polite shop keep that peddles them.
At the mountain's peak, there is a beach and a lake where the sky and water become one. It is very cold water, and the rocks are white. There is often ice in the water, and there are times it is frozen over entirely. The surface reflects the sun and it is often blinding, but its cold depths are unnaturally indigo-dark and utterly endless.
astral locationsYou know, in hindsight... I think the actuallydivine/deitykin/godkin/etc community drove me further away from apotheosis than not. I don't think it is a mistake to want community and to seek it out, and it's not wrong to like pretty things! I love trinkets! I love shinies, and treats!
But... I think a lot of those communities focus on the positive and not the negative. And when I say positive I don't mean "good", I mean... Additive, what godhood gives you, rather than subtractive, what it takes of you, what it requires, what it truly means. It's a lot more about embodiment and servitude than people seem to act. Other things too, it's....... A million threads together and I am the shimmering spider web that completes the picture.
A lot of them are so close, too. Or there are blips here and there. I think my greatest sin is how badly I want to see people reach their potential, I'm nosey and intense and pull strings I perhaps should not. Well, that's how I got here in the first place, isn't it. So I ought to leave them be, and I will! But it does bother me.
I wish the community, and really a lot of these communities at large, had more of a place for meat and less candy. I'm hungry and want to sink my teeth in! Less fluff and more discussions on what this means and how it functions. It used to be more this way, but...... Things have become more superficial as I've aged. How foul!
diary apotheosis"and how do you define evil?" by what's at the other end of my blade, next question!
jokes aside I actually hate using "evil" "enemy" etc because it's so vague but if I had to sit and specifically define what I mean we would be here an eternity. language is flawed and can only convey so much information...
"evil" is not really some abstract force in the world so much as a classification of action. you can do evil but I do not think you can Be evil, generally. even still if I had to define it I think it would be something along the lines of doing something harmful for no wider gain, but even that is too vague and there are exceptions.
Fracking is evil. Abusing someone who relies on you is evil. Is the fracker, or the abuser evil? No, because that's not all that they are, but they are dealing evil to the world. there is an underlying current here, though. and also, I think something important about evil is that it actually is self-defeating or self-harming. The fracker is killing his grandchildren.
Your actions are not in isolation, if fracking had no consequences it would not be evil. Or if the consequences are different perhaps it would not be. So... Evil is a sort of tension, perhaps... Or a mechanism... You act, and evil emanates from it.
diary philosophyThe Knife-Daughter was sharpened again and again. Even by hir mother, he was accused of many plots and conspiracies against her, against her father, against her god.
An edge so sharp it can't help but hunger for what it heard in whispers in thresholds.
For blood, blood, the hunger sang...
This had not been the nature of the unDaughter, but it was born a blank and then cut into a shape, and as he was whittled fate took hold.
And then, the forge. And then, the hammer. Hir false-mother did much of the smithing, the false-father traveling with his lord's wares under moons.
The Knife-Daughter resisted the shape hir mother desired, instead finding that it could forge itself well enough. The tyranny of false-motherhood only grew with the sharpness of the blade.
Every accusation weighed on the hands, the whetstone sharpening and being carved at once, the lies folding with steel into imagination, into thought, and finally into true plot.
The child walked many nights up and down the hallway, wondering when it might seek its freedom. Opening the door slowly and not being caught. The ghost lessons its false-mother taught would serve hir well.
The night of emancipation fell, yet no blade had to be drawn. The false-mother was asleep in her bed, never to wake. Steel, cold and clean in the hand. A false-murder.
diaryin a sense a birth is also a death;
a birth is the death of all other potentiality of what the thing being born could possibly be. through the womb of abstraction and into the world of certainty and definition and form.
with every creation of something comes the death of every other thing it could have been.
we stand atop a stack of our own corpses. dance or fall with them, that is life.
insightsNot everyone is born with the same moral fortune, no matter their truest self or deepest desires. You may want nothing more than to be a healer, a teacher, a nurturer—only to be born into a warzone, conscripted before you’re old enough to understand the choice.
The choices exist, but they are all lethal. Refuse to fight, and face execution. Fight, and die anyway. Flee, and die alone, unsupported. So what do you do? You are an animal. You will choose survival. You will train. You will fight. You will kill—not because you are cruel, but because the current carries you, and the current is war.
This does not make you immoral. If you are cunning, if you are strong, you will walk the path before you. You will find ways to feed that fire inside you, the part that longs to heal, to teach, to love. This keeps your spirit alive. But it does not keep your body alive. So you keep fighting. You keep killing. You carve out moments of mercy, of mentorship, of tenderness—but you are still a soldier.
You can only play the hand you are dealt. Not all hands are equal. Some are born with kings, granted the luxury of never having to swat a fly. But what does that say of their character, when it was never a choice? Privilege, not virtue. And even kings outsource their violence. There goes the advisor, sent to crush the fly in their stead. The advisor’s hand was lesser. That is why he must do it.
Some of us are dealt hands that, if played by the rules, will leave us dead. No matter how badly we want to obey, we must keep an ace up our sleeve—stolen, forged, whatever it takes—to ensure we are not destroyed.
insights philosophyWolf, why are you hungry? Does your belly go empty most moons? Is that why you cry to her, why you take the smallest, the weakest, the kindest, the most vulnerable, the sweetest? Is it because they are the only ones who will not fight back? The only ones who would not make you feel the weight of what you are?
Or is it because you, too, were once small? Because you, too, were once weak? Because you, too, were once taken, and now you take in turn, because that is the only way you know how to be fed?
How can we feed you?
Not with lambs, not with blood, but with something else–something that does not require you to tear flesh from bone. Something that does not require you to leave wreckage in your wake.
But this world does not offer that. This world offers only hunger, only pain, only the endless cycle of taking and being taken. And so you take. And so you are hated. And so the hunters come for your skin, as if that would free the lamb from your belly.
I love you, Wolf. Not because you are deserving, not because you are kind. Because you are mine. You are a part of me, a part of the dark that I too carry. Because I, too, have been hungry. Because I, too, have taken what I should not have taken. Because I, too, have been the monster in someone else's story.
And so, I will protect you from the hunters. Not because you are innocent, but because they do not understand. They think stealing your skin will bring back the lambs, but it will not. It will leave only another wolf in your place. Another creature shaped by hunger, by pain, by the laws of its nature.
I say to you, Wolf: I see your hunger, and your pain, and the path you have torn because of it. And I love you, not in spite of it but because of it. Because you are mine. Because you are the dark I carry within me.
I will protect you. Not because you are good. Because you are mine. And because the hunters do not realize that the wolf is not the flaw, but the pain. The hunger. The true flaw lies in the world that birthed you into a wolf.
The wolf is not evil, but the Wolf in my story is Evil. And I love him.
insights philosophy love