My debut romance novel is being re-released on March 31st in a new edition with several new and expanded scenes!

One witch. Three hearts. A town full of magic.

Aspen Fahey never planned to become anyone’s community witch — especially not their late aunt’s.

A non-binary aspiring witchfluencer barely holding their life together in downtown Toronto, Aspen is burned out, heartbroken, and desperate for a reset. When an unexpected inheritance pulls them to a picturesque town on Vancouver Island, it feels like stepping into a cozy small-town fantasy, complete with folklore magic, and the chance to start over.

What they don’t expect is the complicated pull of new and old connections. A charming local who makes Aspen believe in possibility again. A cool-headed jock whose steady presence feels dangerously safe. And the one person from their past they never quite got over.

As Aspen rebuilds their aunt’s magical practice and learns what it truly means to serve a community, they’re forced to confront the emotional scars left by an abusive ex, and the fear that they might not be capable of the healthy love growing around them. But magic isn’t just about spells and rituals. It’s about trust, vulnerability, and choosing the people who choose you back.

In a town filled with cozy magic and modern folklore, Aspen must decide whether they’re ready to stop surviving, and finally allow themselves to belong.

Perfect for readers who love:
💜 #OwnVoices
💜 Friends to Lovers
💜 Second-Chance Romance
💜 Why-Choose / Polyamorous Romance
💜 Queer Found Family
💜 Small-Town Fresh Start
💜 Cozy Modern Fantasy
💜 Witchy / Community Magic
💜 Healing After Emotional Abuse
💜 Slow-Build Triad Romance

I’m so proud of the work that went into this new edition, and I’m really happy to have a chance to put my super gay, super trans stories into the world.

Special pricing on the eBook pre-order, which you can find here.

After today, the eBook of Parksville Community Witch will be an Amazon exclusive! (Print publication TBA - non-Amazon platforms will be available.)

ALT

One witch. Three hearts. A town full of magic.

Aspen Fahey never planned to become anyone’s community witch — especially not their late aunt’s.

A non-binary aspiring witchfluencer barely holding their life together in downtown Toronto, Aspen is burned out, heartbroken, and desperate for a reset. When an unexpected inheritance pulls them to a picturesque town on Vancouver Island, it feels like stepping into a cozy small-town fantasy, complete with folklore magic, and the chance to start over.

What they don’t expect is the complicated pull of new and old connections. A charming local who makes Aspen believe in possibility again. A cool-headed jock whose steady presence feels dangerously safe. And the one person from their past they never quite got over.

As Aspen rebuilds their aunt’s magical practice and learns what it truly means to serve a community, they’re forced to confront the emotional scars left by an abusive ex, and the fear that they might not be capable of the healthy love growing around them. But magic isn’t just about spells and rituals. It’s about trust, vulnerability, and choosing the people who choose you back.

In a town filled with cozy magic and modern folklore, Aspen must decide whether they’re ready to stop surviving, and finally allow themselves to belong.

Perfect for readers who love:
💜 #OwnVoices
💜 Friends to Lovers
💜 Second-Chance Romance
💜 Why-Choose / Polyamorous Romance
💜 Queer Found Family
💜 Small-Town Fresh Start
💜 Cozy Modern Fantasy
💜 Witchy / Community Magic
💜 Healing After Emotional Abuse
💜 Slow-Build Triad Romance

Early 30s enby leaves the big city (incl their toxic ex and the job they hate) to move to beautiful small town, has meet cute before running into The One That Got Away Out March 31!

“My life has turned into a Lifemark movie,” Aspen groaned, flopping dramatically onto their bed. “Thirty year old enby leaves the big city, including their terrible partner and the job they hate, to move to a beautiful small town, has meet cute with beautiful stranger before running into The One That Got Away.”

There was a choking sound on the other end of the line.

“You’re allowed to laugh,” Aspen grumbled. “Even I think it’s ridiculous, and I’m living it.”

Becks didn’t laugh, but Aspen could hear the grin in her voice. “I assume the beautiful stranger is Rav, but who is The One That Got Away?”

“Remember that guy I was hopelessly in love with in high school? The wholesome football player?”

“Maybe?”

“My best friend? The one that was over all the time?”

“Oh my god, that himbo you tutored, then pined for the rest of high school? The one you wanted to smash from orbit?”

“Not a himbo,” Aspen bristled, unable to argue with the rest of Becks’

description. “Especially not since she’s Nat now. I ran into her at the gym

just now when I was dropping off cards around town, and we’re going to

catch up when she’s done with work.”

Discounted DRM-free pre-order

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Looking for a book for Trans Rights Readathon that feels like this?

💖 Cozy fantasy + contemporary romance
🔮 Modern takes on folklore creatures
🌳 Beautiful Canadian town
🏳️‍🌈 Queer and neurodivergent AF

Parksville Community Witch releases March 31.

Discounted DRM-free pre-order

Second draft revisions of current WIP, and one of my favorite things is accusing myself in-text of bad writing.’

(Fae MC is asking vampire love interest about vampire abilities)

Eamon furrowed his brow in confusion. “If you’re dead, then… I mean, sorry to nerd out on you here, but you don’t breathe, and you don’t have a gag reflex, which means… you don’t have a functioning digestion system?”

Maks wrinkled his nose. “It functions. Mostly. It just can’t digest food anymore, and it sucks. I miss food. And coffee.” He sighed. “Every once in a while I drink it anyway and put up with the consequences - they didn’t have those whipped coffee desert things in my time, and I love them.”

Eamon filed away the idea of drinking a sugary coffee and seeing if Maks could taste it on the inside of his mouth for later. “Okay. But you also have a functioning circulatory system? Like, your hand is warm, and I’ve seen you blush, and.” He grinned and made a suggestively phallic gesture. “Other things. So if you’re dead, then how does all that still work?”

“Vampires are all about blood,” Maks said diffidently, smiling when Eamon wasn’t satisfied with his answer. “I don’t know, okay? It’s magic, and I don’t know how it works. It just does.”

Eamon huffed. “Well I think it’s very sloppy and bad world building.”

Maks actually threw back his head and laughed in delight. “Well if I figure out who you can send feedback to, I’ll be sure to pass that on.”

“You do that,” Eamon shot back, grinning from ear to ear.

For this years Trans Rights Readathon, consider supporting a trans author by pre-ordering Parksville Community Witch - Book 1 in a fantasy romance series I started writing because I got tired of never reading romance about people like me.

After writing it, I discovered that other people needed it too.

• Trans romantic leads
• Non-binary POV
• Autism & ADHD rep
• Anxious bisexual disasters
• Healing from emotional abuse

Discounted non-DRM pre-order here.

The eBook will ONLY be available on Amazon after release on March 31st!

whatacartouchebag:

Crawling out of my hole to remind people that with this current update to Firefox (version 144) they’ve gone and dumped in their lot with a buncha lil AI tools, namely Perplexity as a new search engine.

So if the sound of that leaves your mouth tasting of tar, here’s what you want to do:

In the url bar, type in about:config

It’ll give you a big scary warning page that you might poke holes in your browser. Good. You want to do that. Click continue.

One by one, you’re going to need to put each of these into the search bar in the page, not up top:

browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled

Each of these are gonna have a lil toggle icon on the right hand side that looks like a funky double-ended arrow. Click that and the value next to it should change to false. It all auto saves as you go. Some of these might already be set to false by default and that’s peachy.

The next best thing you can do for yourself is to set your default search engine to udm14 or Qwant, but for now, we’re just tidying the garden a lil bit.

(via gallusrostromegalus)

inbabylontheywept:

What Talon And What Dreadful Claw

I wrote this in response to this prompt. Ivan Alexander recorded this story, so if you like audiobooks, click here to listen. I cannot understate how talented he is.

She’d watched him walking over the horizon for almost six hours now. She loved getting guests - loved seeing the resignation of men half dead with thirst, trading certain death in the sands for possible death near her waters.

And they were hers. The promise of Ramses still stood, even if it had been a millennium since the concord. By rite of blood and writ of paper she was the queen of the deeper duat. And it was a queen’s privilege to choose her guests. And, occasionally, kill them with her claws.

She could have flown over, but she had time. More time than anyone. More than enough time to wait.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

Her guest was not half dead. He was, to be technical, less than a quarter dead, but that was only if you measured things in years.

He was young. His face certainly seemed less lined than her own. There wasn’t much else she could judge age from - the lines of her form folded into wings and furs and claws at the same point that his folded into silks and beads.

He’d prepared for the meeting by bringing a wealth of spices. It was a trick common to royal travelers: If sweat couldn’t be prevented, it could at least be masked. She could still pick traces of it up under the sandalwood and myrrh, but it was pleasant. Salty and metallic and sharp, underneath all the soft wisps of smoke.

He’d brought her gifts. When she told him that the gifts were not acceptable as passage, he said that wasn’t how gifts worked. Gifts weren’t given in exchanges - they were given for the joy of giving. And it brought him joy to share with her.

She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she simply asked if he intended to cross through her duat.

“Maybe,” he replied. “What’s your price?”

“A riddle,” she’d said. “If you get it right, you can pass. But if you get it wrong, I will devour even your bones.”

He grinned and it wasn’t false bravado. He’d known the cost before she said it.

“I love riddles. I accept.”

She loved this part. She loved the tension of it, that singular moment of truth where she wasn’t just a mind or a monster, but something straddling both worlds.

She spoke.

“I can survive beyond death, but can be broken without force. I can summon without breath but-”

“A promise.”

She looked at him wide-eyed. It wasn’t her best riddle, but it was one she’d made herself. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.

She let him pass but she did - to her great shame - sulk. To his credit, he only lingered an hour or so in the shade of the oasis. There was a longing to him that she couldn’t describe. It unsettled her, but it went away when he took his camels and continued past, traveling on into the deep duat.

She forgot about his gifts until long after he’d passed the horizon. She’d expected human trinkets - gold and gems. Useless baubles. The pelts that had been carefully rolled up and placed inside the chest were strangely thoughtful.

She carried them back to her cave, and laid them flat across the floor. That night she slept better than she had in many, many years. In the morning, she woke up and smelled myrrh, and was almost happy to imagine the prince coming back. If she was disappointed to realize that the smell was coming from the scents soaked into the furs, that was a secret she could keep even from herself.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓐭

It was a week before he came back.

She recognized his outline on the horizon. She had a good memory, and beyond that, he’d made quite an impression on his first meeting with her.

He’d begun to run low on his spices, and his clothes were looking far more rumpled than they had at the start. That travel was beginning to wear him down should’ve meant nothing to her. Now, she felt odd. Would she still feel victorious if he failed her riddle? Or would it haunt her, knowing she could only catch him at his worst?

(Did she want to catch him?)

She waited for him to make it to her oasis again. It seemed to be part of the ritual, to sit and watch the speck on the horizon grow to the size of a man. They didn’t exchange pleasantries when he arrived. Instead he gave a small nod to acknowledge her before climbing down from atop his camel. She hadn’t demanded it prior because she knew all too well how easy it was to catch a camel, but there was still something respectful in the gesture. Here was a prince willing to die with dignity. Here was a man who lived and died by rules.

Could she be blamed for admiring that?

Only when he was fully settled in to listen did she begin her riddle.

“Toothless maw that eats all these:

Raw flesh, dung, fresh air, and trees.

At night I’m bright, in day I’m black,

I die, I’m gone, but always back.”

She was on the third line when she saw his face light up. He waited to answer this time, more focused on being polite than showing off how clever he was. She liked that. She knew he was clever, but now she knew he could be patient too.

“A campfire.”

It was one of her favorite riddles, and the joy she got was twofold. She was happy for the prince, happy that he would survive another day, and happy for herself too. It was infinitely preferable to lose with skill than to win through circumstance. She would feel robbed, if she had to eat the prince on a bad day. If he lost, he needed to lose at his best. He needed to lose in a way that mattered.

He went through the oasis again, but lingered far longer. They spoke in moments about each other’s lives - her memories of the time before even Ramses, and his experience as the seventh in line to the throne. He was trusted to act as an emissary specifically because he was so far from inheriting the throne.

“Not that I’d want it anyway,” he said. “A camel is a better throne than any silly golden chair. The seat in the palace only lets me see the bald spot on the high priest’s head. The saddle on this camel lets me see all the beauty in the world.”

His head wasn’t turned towards her when he said that, but she could see his eyes glance over her.

It was easy to pretend she didn’t notice, and he did nothing to press it further. She showed him the best trees for picking dates, the best ponds for catching fish, and the first cave she’d set her lair up in - back before even Ramses. Back when she was much, much smaller.

She slept in the next morning. The sunlight made a soft beam through the cave, over the pelts, before landing across her face. Any other day it would’ve been a wonderful way to wake up, but the realization that she’d missed her chance to say goodbye made her scramble. She made a short flight over the waters to see if he was gone, and got her answer before even landing - there was no camel tied to the palms.

Still, he’d left her a gift. The boar roasting over glowing coals had clearly been caught the night before, and the fact that it was unspiced meant it was for her.

It was also another oddly thoughtful gesture. How many humans would realize that unseasoned meat was a sphinx’s preference? How many would research that far?

She landed near the meal and approached. Down on the ground, there was so much more detail to see. The tracks of the camel, the care taken to not leave a mess. The simple note left besides the firepit.

She reached out and read.

I’m sure you don’t depend on travelers for your meals

But I do feel bad, having deprived you twice.

Enjoy the boar. I will be back in two weeks.

She hadn’t taken a bite yet, but she could pretend the warmth in her stomach was the meal. Two bites was all it took to make the illusion complete.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

She waited until the fifteenth day before flying.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected - a sandstorm, perhaps, or a heatstruck camel. Instead, it was only a few minutes flight before the smell of blood caught in the back of her throat.

It was hard to describe what happened after that. Sometimes, she was more mind than monster. Sometimes, she was more monster than mind. That day was a monster day.

He’d lost a lot of blood by the time she found him. A frankly terrifying amount of blood. She could carry him back to the oasis, but that’d only delay the inevitable.

But sphinx knew many things that humans did not.

She carried him, and he was light in her claws. Light in the way that humans were, but some small, scared part of her brain was worried that the blood loss made him lighter still. Like a date left in the sun.

She followed the trail through the desert until she found the thieves that did this. They had his gifts and his spices. They’d have taken the clothes off his corpse if they’d been able to catch his camel.

They’d have taken his life. The one human life she’d valued in one-thousand years, and they’d have taken his life.

It was hard to hate humans. They were so small and short lived that taking them personally felt childish. But this day, she hated, and it made killing easy. Five of the six bandits were extraneous. The last, thankfully, had blood that smelled like the prince.

(He was much less thankful about this than she was).

She took them both back, the prince held gently in her front talons, the bandit half crushed in the back. The transfer spell took exactly as much as it needed. It would’ve been crueler to let the bandit suffer the same fate he’d intended to inflict on the prince - to struggle on with too little blood, until his body failed. It was tempting, but she felt a sick gratitude that he had what she’d needed when she needed it, so she made the end quick. Or, quick enough.

Thirty seconds isn’t long, but it’s an eternity when falling.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

The prince recovered enough to speak after three days. He asked her to tell him riddles, and if she was as jealous of her domain as she pretended, she’d have said no. But good riddles were the tool she used to rid herself of unwanted guests, and this guest was… wanted.

So she read riddles to him for days at a time. Read all the ones she’d hoarded from scholars. Read ones she wrote herself, just for fun. She started with her best riddles because she loved his praise, but moved on to her earlier ones because what they lacked in cleverness, they made up for by being earnest.

He loved those riddles the most.

One week stretched into two. He spent his days swimming after fish, chasing after boars with spears made of stone (she hadn’t seen that in a very long time) and scurrying up the trees to pick dates. And his nights, he spent imagining riddles around a campfire.

She knew it wasn’t going to be permanent, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be beautiful. She’d outlived so many things in this world - seen rivers change courses and lakes run dry. If impermanence was a poison, then it was a poison she couldn’t avoid. There was no wall she could build to keep death at bay. She could only share her home with it and hope that one, one wonderful, far away day, that even death would die.

But that day would not be soon.

The king’s men found the oasis after a month of searching. There were no riddles this time. The prince left willingly, and the men with bronze blades stayed respectfully far from her part of the duat. It went as good as it could have gone, all things considered. If some part of her felt empty afterwards, well, maybe she just needed to eat.

Regular gifts did find her way to the duat, as thanks after that. Herds of goats were released near her borders, to hunt at her own leisure. Soft pelts from the northern lands were delivered in chests, and she luxuriated in their fluff.

Most importantly, a regular shipment of blank vellum began to make its way to the duat. She was told was explicitly that it was for her to write more riddles. And also, if she had a spare moment, she could send letters back with the vendor. The prince always made sure to send at least one out to her, and she always made sure to send one back.

Always.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁗 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑𓁗

It had been decades.

She just-

She couldn’t see how humans were like this. She’d written with him six months ago! He’d been sharp as ever. Sharper, even. Time had winnowed him into a razor’s edge, and she’d been so amazed to see him change. And then he’d gotten busy, and they’d stopped writing letters for just a month, and then it was two months, and then three and now-

Now he wasn’t well.

The last letter she’d received hadn’t even been from him. It had been from his eldest brother, the reigning pharaoh. And it had broken her heart.

He was forgetting… everything. His mind was breaking. Decades of brilliance, and now he was falling apart at the seams. Some days, he didn’t even know who he was. But on the days that he did, the only thing he could talk about was going to the oasis one last time.

And his brother who had kept him close, who had been so protective of him after his near death with the bandits, had finally agreed.

He was going to be arriving any day now. The note had a sort of helpless plea attached - that he didn’t know what to do at this point, but that whatever it cost her to keep him comfortable, he would repay tenfold.

She sent a letter back saying it was a gift. She was the queen of the duat, and it pleased her to give this to her neighboring kingdom. Nevermind that her kingdom had no subjects, nevermind that she had no armies at her disposal. What she had, she could give, and this was… easy.

It made her happy to write the letter. It remind her of the first words the prince had spoken to her, all those years ago.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁗

He arrived a few days later, escorted by fifty soldiers. She was grateful that he was in one of his lucid moments. She couldn’t imagine how it would be, to be seen and not known.

She didn’t wait for them to make it all the way to her oasis. She flew over to meet them, and then carried him back. The traditional wait was from when she thought she had time. Before she’d realized that there were ways for even an immortal to find themselves in a hurry.

He spent his first day back chasing fish, the same way he did before. The boars he left be - seventy, he insisted, was far too old to be messing with boars. And when the evening came, they gathered by a campfire to share riddles.

They went back and forth, laughing at each other’s crafts. It was only after an hour of reminiscing that she actually asked him her favorite riddle, the riddle that she had permanently written in as His riddle. The one with toothless maws and meat and light in the dark, and he stared at her - not blankly, but worse, confused, because he recognized the riddle, but could no longer answer it.

She could see the distress growing in him, and it broke her heart. He hemmed and hawed, but right when he looked on the brink of giving up, he looked at the fire and started in relief.

“A campfire!” he said, and they laughed, and if he could pretend his tears were mirth and not mourning she could pretend that hers were the same.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

He was not well the next day.

He knew who he was, thankfully, but he didn’t remember getting there. He stumbled around almost dazed until he saw her. Then he sighed in relief.

“This is my favorite dream,” he confided in her. “I’d like to get back here for real one day - but this dream is lovely. Can you read me some more riddles? Just like last time. I’ve never forgotten.”

She didn’t even touch her later works. She went to her earliest ones, the easy ones, and the way he pondered minutes at a time made her stomach clench.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

She did not sleep that night.

She had spent literally her entire life trying to make harder and harder riddles, and now-

They needed to be easy. They needed to be simple. They needed to rhyme, and feel like riddles, but they needed to be solvable by someone that -

She had to stop writing for a few moments to compose herself. She couldn’t afford to cry on the vellum. A new shipment wouldn’t arrive in time.

She was immortal, but she was still running out of time.

𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒

He woke up the next morning completely confused. She’d prepared her first riddle as

“Who sits in the sand

Beside my lair

Who swims through fish

With thin white hair

Who braved the desert and survived

Then returned home alive and thrived?”

But after several seconds of silence she couldn’t take it anymore.

“It’s you,” she said.

“Oh!” he replied, surprised.

“What do you know about this place?”, she asked, after several more long seconds of quiet.

“…Not a lot,” he admitted. “But I know I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said.

That was the only riddle she had for the day. He fell asleep in the midmorning, and she took the time to go catch a goat for them. He was still asleep when she returned and remained that way the rest of the day. She stayed awake long after sunset, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest and praying it would never stop. She wasn’t sure when she fell asleep - she just knew that when she woke up, her prayer had gone unanswered.

𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁒 𓁓 𓁔 𓁕 𓁖 𓁗 𓐭 𓐮 𓁐 𓁑 𓁗

The vellum vendor arrived at the start of the deep duat only to find the oasis empty. He looked for hours, but there was only a single vellum left behind in the cave. He grabbed it and read the half finished riddle.

​ What hungers and is never full?

What is complete but never whole?

What pierces armor, shields, and hearts?

What ends before it even starts?

What force can make a monster thrall

What talon and what dreadful claw

Can heal the slice it makes each day?

What pain can make the godless pray?

It was all he could take back to the pharaoh.

He hoped it was enough.

(via inbabylontheywept)

foldingfittedsheets:

My coworker Rhaeya was chatting with me about having just had lunch.

I asked, “Have you found our microwave isn’t as good?” Cause I’ve had frozen meals take longer to heat up at this store.

“I don’t know,” she said, “the only thing I’ve used it for is the… yesterday, the… you know. The pizza pop tarts?”

I started laughing quietly but got progressively louder as she announced, “The Hot Pockets!”

“Pizza pop tarts,” I wheezed, trying not to scare the customers on the other side of the store.

“That’s basically what they are!”

(via foldingfittedsheets)

It happened the day after my first fight with my mother over school pictures. She had a dress picked out for me to wear, and I, willful and contrary child that I was, decided that I didn’t want to wear dresses anymore, actually.

She lost that fight - I wore a blouse and pants. But the next day she brought this thresher maw up to my room, said he was mine now. He was to live in my closet, and I was supposed to take care of him. When I asked why a thresher maw had to live in my closet, she rolled her eyes.

“He’s just a baby,” she said dismissively. “I grew up with a thresher maw in my closet. Everyone does. It’s no big deal.”

“But why do I have to have one?”

All she would say was, “he’s going to help you make good choices.”

Once I realized he couldn’t leave the closet, he was pretty easily dealt with, at least. I waited until he was asleep, then moved all of my tomboyish clothing out of my closet and into my drawers. The thresher maw could live with my dresses - I wasn’t using them anyway. Sometimes I’d have to go in my closet for something my parents had stored in there, and he’d always take a swipe at me, but usually he didn’t succeed at taking a piece out of me.

Usually.

It wasn’t long after that, though, that the first thresher maw appeared in my classes at school.

He was bigger, and a lot scarier than the baby who lived in my closet (who I guess was kind of a runt). Ostensibly, he was there to enforce the classroom rules. In reality, the boys could all but hang from the ceiling without making it mad. The girls, meanwhile, would get terrorized the instant any of them looked like they might be contemplating mischief.

Naturally, school quickly became one of my least favorite places - especially after the boys learned they could bait the thresher maw into snapping at me when I had to go to my cubby.

The year after that, I was assigned a personal thresher maw in addition to the classroom thresher maw. I didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t show enough interest in classroom topics or activities, apparently. When I asked how having a vicious thresher maw inside my desk was supposed to help me pay attention, the adults just threatened to give me a bigger, nastier thresher maw. So I learned not to complain.

Then my mother brought home the biggest, meanest, most vicious thresher maw I’d ever seen in my entire life and gave him free run of the first floor of the house. My room quickly became my refuge - for whatever reason, the big thresher maw respected the territorial claim of the little one in my closet. And reading became my escape - an escape into a world where I could be free of the constant terror of thresher maws.

There weren’t any people like me in the books I read - no children whose adults were constantly terrorizing them with thresher maws. But there also weren’t any thresher maws at all in those stories, and that was enough.

I couldn’t spend all my time in my room, however. I was expected to participate in “Family Time”, of which the giant thresher maw was always a part.

In truth, my mother preferred the thresher maw to me, her actual child. She’d often “joke” about feeding me to the thresher maw, but no one ever laughed.

In high school, I started to get a sense of which spaces would be safe from thresher maws, and under what conditions they would remain so. One of the instructors at my Tae Kwon Do school was a thresher maw, but he was pretty chill, as long as you never pointed out that he worked the girls twice as hard as the boys.

I managed to get out of my thresher-maw-loving community when I went to college. And… it’s not that there weren’t thresher maws in university, exactly, because there were. For one, my childhood thresher maws refused to be parted from me. My closet maw and I were almost buddies at that point. But my mother insisted on budding a new baby thresher maw from her giant, and the baby hated me just as much as the original did.

But since it was either take him or give up on going to university…

What else could I do?

Even so, university was the breath of freedom that I’d desperately needed. As university students, we had the freedom to set our own schedules and routines. And on a big campus like ours, it was very easy to order your life such that you mostly didn’t have to worry about running into them. The frats and sororities, of course, were riddled with them. But. Whatever. I didn’t have to have anything to do with Greek life.

Life went on, and for the most part I was lucky. Lucky to find a husband who had grown up with thresher maws, and knew that they weren’t anything to joke about. And I was lucky to have access to thresher maw training courses. They were insanely hard to access, and very expensive, of course. But they did at least make my personal thresher maws more tolerable to live with.

When I got pregnant with my kid, I went on a thresher maw mitigation spree. The ones I couldn’t get rid of, I forced through training program after training program, determined that my kid wasn’t going to live under constant terror the way I did. No way, no how.

And things went pretty well until the pandemic, when we were all locked in our houses. My thresher maws started to go crazy from being trapped inside all day. Before I knew it, my closet maw - my childhood buddy - had merged with the clone of my mother’s maw and a clone of the classroom maw from school that I hadn’t even known was living with me - apparently he’d stowed away with me years ago and was just very good at hiding.

So now I was trapped in my house with a ravenous three-headed thresher maw the size of a Volkswagon who was hungry for my flesh specifically. And I realized that I had a choice. I could let the damned thing kill me, or I could start learning how to fight back.

Of course, in our very pro-maw society, that made me an instant target of hate. Getting eaten by thresher maws was part of the natural order - if it was my time, then it was my time. Fighting back against the maws was a perversion of the highest order.

I did it anyway.

I started small - with not letting people use pro-maw language around me, and even that was a bridge too far for my mother. After multiple visits where she reminisced fondly about the childhood maw that hated me, then broke down in tears because she felt attacked when I told her in no uncertain terms that her maw was homicidal and had almost killed me on many occasions, I finally told her she could either apologize or remove herself from my life.

She chose to remove herself from my life.

My husband was a blessing. “Teach me how to fight the maws,” he said. He didn’t care that they weren’t trying to eat him, that it was something he shouldn’t have to do. “Teach me how to fight the maws”.

And he did. Truthfully, in the beginning he was better than I was at spotting the maws when they were sneaking up on me.

My kung fu school is another blessing. They are emphatically anti-thresher maw. No thresher maw sifus or assistants allowed, and they fumigate regularly to chase off any maws that do happen to sneak in.

It took a hell of a lot of effort, but I chopped the clone heads off of my closet maw, and now… Well. Our relationship is complicated. He’s been with me my entire life, knows how to get through cracks in my foundation that I don’t even know are there. Mostly he just makes a nuisance of himself, forces me to work around him. But sometimes he’ll pitch a fit, and let me tell you - getting chased by a thresher maw isn’t something you recover from as quickly in your 40s as you do in your 20s.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of him. He’s a tough old bastard, and no matter how hard I hit him, he never stays away for long.

And.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I should never have been given that maw in the first place. Siccing thresher maws on children isn’t a loving or healthy way to parent your kids. And I shouldn’t have to worry about the people who wish harm on me because of my “anti-maw lifestyle”. Children shouldn’t ever have to accept that carving off pieces of themselves is the price of safety.

I deserved better.

And so do you.