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You hate yourself so loudly. You hate yourself at the top of your lungs. Your loathing for yourself permeates your speech. “Sorry I’m just rambling.” “Don’t worry about it.” “Just ignore me.” “Sorry if I’m annoying you.” “Sorry I don’t make sense.” “Sorry about that.” Sorry, sorry, sorry. You act as if you have to beat everyone else to the punch. As if the punching bag is you. If you hate yourself first, if you hate yourself loudest, then nobody will hurt you. You clapped your hands over your ears and shut your eyes and balled yourself up so that you’d never have to experience people’s loathing for you. And it meant you never heard their love. You drowned it out. You screamed your hatred over it. And you never got to hear it. 

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First attempt at a bucket hat, based loosely (like, loosely) on this pattern.

It’ll be a long slouchy man

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what happened is a fucking court appearance and none of us remember the details of w h yyy

What?? Rex?? Dressed??

Like in clothes??

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the joke is that they're all wretched undead. the band is called Bogan Vampires

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rehydrated Rex (he) and Bonesy (they) doing a flirt, watch me never ever attempt those tattoos again.

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Garden of Bones 01 || Rex does a GTA

Servitor Rex lands with a SPLAT on the windscreen of an unsuspecting motorist, traveling at highway speed down the M3. “Ryan!”

The driver’s name is not Ryan; he screams.

“Ryan I need the car, get in the passenger side!”

“WHAT THE FUCK”

“I SAID GIMME THE CAR”

Wearing nothing but a pair of jeans one size too big, Rex clambers in via the driver’s side window, too fast and too small for the motorised glass to forbid his ferret-like squirming. Thankfully, not-Ryan is present enough of mind to swerve onto the shoulder and judder the car to a halt, grinding the front bumper against the guard rail. His full-volume objections go unheeded as Rex kicks him to the opposite side of the cabin, with far more wiry strength than his tiny, fatty frame belies.

“Aurgh, of course it’s a fucking manual,” Rex growls, and struggles impotently with the gear stick.

Not-Ryan is still screaming profanities, pressed against the passenger door to maximise the distance between himself and the clearly unhinged, dog-faced Fae who just hijacked his vehicle, and is now attempting a clumsy, grunting dance with the uncooperative clutch.

The chaos rattling around inside the cabin is interrupted by a thunderous tremor, vibrating up from the ground beneath them.

Then another, boom. Scrape; boom; scrape, rhythmic, as something titanic approaches from the rear on claws and legs big enough to disrupt the surrounding traffic.

Both occupants turn to look through the back window, in time to shriek in unison at the serpentine figure bearing down on them teeth-first.

CRASH, as a spidery, articulate hand the span of the entire car slaps down on its roof, cracking every window and irreparably buckling both axles. “REX, YOU SQUIGGLY FUCK” the serpent howls; Rex and not-Ryan redouble their screaming, before the driver’s side door is pinched in half and ripped from the hinges.

Another, similarly arachnine hand reaches into the car and wraps around Rex in his entirety, squeezing just enough to deflate his mania with a little squeak! He kicks formlessly as he’s pulled from the driver’s seat, leaving nothing behind but the thumps and honks of his bullet-like feet striking at least every square inch of the front console.

By now, it’s all not-Ryan can do to hyperventilate; the air hitches in his lungs as the serpent’s colossal face makes its appearance in the gaping void left by his car door. Human features, unsettlingly soft and smooth around those horrible pointed teeth, regard him with a matronly kind of exhaustion.

“I am sincerely sorry, he has a seizure condition. Let me get you my details, for the… the car stuff. I have a guy.��� Its voice is too smooth and lilting to pick a gender, unlike Rex, who looks and sounds like a bogan vampire — despite his petulant screaming having returned at a helium pitch.

In all the confusion, not-Ryan latches on to a concept more foreign to him than the existence of Fae at all, which is barely news in the era of camera phones. “Wait—Fae can have seizures?”

The serpent’s statuesque face was withdrawing, but the promise of an impromptu lecture brings its aquiline Germanic nose front and centre once more. Huge, pale yellow eyes peer into the rumpled cabin. “Oh! Yes, and Rex is right from the taproot of our tree, so actually his spasms hit all of us. It’s quite fascinating, in fact—”

Not-Ryan half-listens, figuring himself more or less a captive audience, while his wider awareness registers the rest of the serpent’s pied coils compressing into a more catlike form under the initial forty-or-so feet of muscular neck.

“— And I’m forced by necessity to bear down on mine, so of course I have constant pounding headaches while I have to deal with his dissociative episodes—”

“Dissociative episodes, uh-huh,” not-Ryan mutters, eyes flickering around for signs of where the serpent stashed its prey. He hasn’t decided which one is the more present threat: the titanic Sphynx making a resting spot of the entire highway while it vents its frustrations; or the tiny, hyper-manic dogman who seems to be some kind of literally spastic escape artist, smuggling a frightening amount of lean muscle and compacted rage.

“—I could go into the nitty-gritty of Fae physiology, all the interlinked psychic viscera, the somato-sensory homunculus, shapeshifting and dysmorphia, etcetera—”

Actually, the long-winded hyperfixation is helping not-Ryan locate his own  frantic pulse again, and he’s able to start absorbing specific details — like the serpent’s magpie-styled fur and disturbingly graceful fingers, as it gesticulates with (he counts briefly) at least eight arms. He finally spots the captive hijacker, and breathes a sigh of relief; it’s far more comforting that ‘Rex’ is visibly accounted for, lest he airdrop on a less experienced driver.

“S-sorry,” not-Ryan begrudgingly interrupts, “you said something about—about fixing my car?”

The Sphynx-Fae blinks a couple of times and makes an exasperated “nguh” noise, shaking off the word-vomit. “Of course, I’m so sorry. My name is Weaver, let me just— uh. Hold on, I have no pockets—” two or three arms disappear into the fur… feathers… coat of Weaver’s neck, which begins rustling around like they’re looking for something. One arm darts back out and places a pair of low-profile spectacles atop that proud nose.

Not-Ryan points a hesitant finger at Rex, who has since stopped thrashing and looks suspiciously limp in Weaver’s sinewy grip. “He okay? Or uh. Alive?”

It pauses in its rifling and turns its attention to Rex, who has been absent-mindedly compressed for the last few minutes. Embarrassment flashes across its ambiguously feminine features. Sitting upright, Weaver relaxes its grip and examines Rex for a moment, well above not-Ryan’s field of vision.

Rex appears well and truly unconscious, his limbs dangling uselessly from between Weaver’s fingers. It takes a moment to appraise him; consternation twists up its features briefly. A free hand gingerly rises up as if to poke him awake, before prod, prod, prod, precisely ten times at random spots on his torso, and Rex’s floppy ragdoll is lifted to one side of Weaver’s head. They release a frustrated little huff from the nostrils, mouth pressed into a thin line.

Not-Ryan squints his confusion at the weird silhouette before him.

BR-R-R-R-INGGG

“Agh fuck me, Jesus!”

Bones is shocked alert by the brassy ring-tone, which seems to come from everywhere in the treehouse. They plug one saucer-sized ear with a pinky, and raise a piece of yellow fruit to the other.

“Banana phone, what’s up.”

“Can you check Rex’s vitals for me?” Weaver’s exasperated voice bounces around in Bones’s primordial skull.

“Chrissakes, did he take off again? Hang on,” the banana phone is lashed under a convenient headband for hands-free correspondence, so that Bones can start tapping away at the immense console built into their work station. “Swear to fuckin’ god, lose track of that cunt for five fuckin’ minutes—”

“I got him before he caused any serious damage, but we owe somebody a new Camry and there’s some havoc on the motorway.”

“I call an entire fuckin’ car ‘serious damage’!”

“Not compared to the first incident.”

Bones pauses in their tapping and sets their jaw for a moment, conceding that point without argument. Hiding the carnage from the police was a day-long job. “I suppose as far as cars go, a Camry is pretty easy to fix up. His vitals are fine, looks like an adrenaline crash.”

Weaver heaves out a sigh of relief. “Good, I was worried I squeezed a bit hard… he’s gone very limp, normally he doesn’t sleep this well.”

“Just hard enough, apparently. Crush his soul back into his body, all that good autsy shit. Anyway.”

As promised, Weaver exchanges “information” with not-Ryan, in the form of what appears to be a holographic tarot card with some kind of nursery rhyme hand-written on the back. “Speak this out loud into a mushroom ring to get in contact with our correspondence guy. Name of Bonesy, looks a bit like a spider monkey with too many legs.” This being the first time he’s been involved in a traffic incident with some Fae, not-Ryan is more relieved that he still has skin and teeth.

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My poor shitty little phone camera did its best, but anyway: Weaver is a Sphynx type fae, and by a wide margin the absolute scariest when they get angy.

Everyone is traumatised, and Weaver gets all the hypervigilance. Sleep deprived crankyfeathers.

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When South Africa dismantled apartheid, it did not end with the expulsion of all white South Africans. They became part of the new South Africa, just without the criminal discriminatory oligarchic powers the apartheid goverment had. When Bolivia recognized its indigenous heritage and became a plurinational state, it did not mean that people of European descent were expelled in masse. It meant the recognition of the previously discriminated indigenous and mestizo people of Bolivia and the beginning of a path of integration and revalidation.

What I mean is that it's ridiculous to think that decolonization inherently means mass suffering and relocation, that's what colonization does. Decolonization is recognizing the crimes of colonization, but more importantly, material, political and social steps to give power and self-determination to the exploited native people who were victims of colonialism and imperialism.

In multicultural societies, you don't go like in that Peter Griffin meme with a skin tone chart and saying 'well, you go back to Europe, you go back to Africa, you stay here'. You build a new society on the paradigm of dignity for exploited people and equality under the law. People are acting like this is some sort of fantastic utopia instead of real initiatives that were done in living memory, with successes and failures, as all such initiatives have. One must ask why are some so insistent that multicultural societies can't thrive, especially when for most of history, societies were indeed like that. Consider why you think like that.

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Back on my shit, free handing needlessly complicated designs instead of just following a fucking pattern

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Some shit went down last year and we're coping with pulp fantasy nonsense, but Rene is. Slightly too aware now of the kind of gross violence that seems to run pretty strongly on dad's side of the family.

There wasn't any literal cannibalism, but the police did have to get a cheek swab and we have a record, now.

Anyhow, Puck has been retired as a self-insert blorb, his characterisation was kind of part of the problem. Couldn't really reconcile where he came from with where we're at. He lives in the heartstone, now.

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The sirens are so offended and intrigued by my backtalk that they sink the entire ship just to get to me, specifically.

Man-eating sirens have plagued these waters for as long anyone can remember. Now, as you sail across the ocean with your crew, siren songs begin to entrance everyone on board. In a desperate move to save the others, you try something no one else has tried before; you sing along with them.

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Puck takes himself too seriously; Bones is helping.

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Thinking about scenery which reconciles Puck's disparate parts, who take the forms of terminal depression and FITE, respectively. Special appearance by the Secrets Box, and the token representing Puck's capacity for grotesque, unapologetic violence.

He eats someone alive, it's very bloody and awful I'm sure.

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I am having tremendous fun doing gay fae shit in a low-production pulp fantasy capacity.

Puck is a Last Unicorn flavoured drama queen, Bones is a primate centitaur with innumerate arms (all of which are for partying), Archie is a pied Sphynx with emotional and rational attachment issues, Oberon is GOD FUCKING TIRED, and all of them are traumatised shapeshifters.

For the purposes of this story, fae propagate like trees.

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h. hEY

it's a lot of stuff...

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Gay fae shit to deal with real feels

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Bones helpfully controls Puck's epilepsy