#Ransom and the Speaker’s Carrion

[moltengoldveins]

Excerpt from Ransom and the Speaker’s Carrion - Full Chapter! (Thanks @billiamdoor)

(IMPORTANT NOTE: this is not intended to be the first chapter in this book. I write non-linearly. This is at most the third or fourth chapter. It is, however, Flannery’s introduction, and everyone loves a woman who could Just Kill Them, so… yeah 👍)

(TWs: descriptions of blood, gore, and a cadaver in the context of medical autopsies and crime scene investigations. A slight passing mention of SA, if you pay attention. Insurance companies being insurance companies.)

.

Ransom didn’t think of doctors without remembering his father. 

His father wasn’t a doctor, of course. He hated them. And over the first few years of Ransom’s childhood, his father’s wry, comedic rants against the whole medical institution had distilled themselves into a sort of running monologue in his mind. He was never without it, never stepped into an office but he was met with his father’s loud, jovial, sardonic voice. 

“Envisioning a doctor of the modern day,” He would begin, in an odd mixture of his native Chicago accent and a faux British drawl,  “Is always an amusing mental exercise, if one is of a vigorous enough constitution to hold to the principle that it is better to laugh than cry.” 

Ransom hadn’t understood much of what his father said, growing up. He’d gone to a good college, Ransom’s father. He could use words like scalpels. He’d had a good job, too. Good enough to pay for a hell of a lot of medical bills, and not much else. 

“This might seem a strange assertion at first. The thing that breaks at once upon the mind  like a bottle to the head at the sound of the word ‘doctor’ is a white lab coat. Perhaps, if one has a penchant for the fantastical, a shock of wild hair and a mad grin.

“But then, I did not say that envisioning a doctor was a process that would bring a sane man to laughter and a tired one to weeping. I said a modern doctor, and now the image becomes quite another thing altogether. 

“The faces of modern doctors are many and varied, broad and narrow, pudgy and sharp, dark and light - a few of them are even women! But despite the modern days’ enamorment with false variety in our doctors, we can, with the discerning eye of a four year old,” And he would duck down to pinch at Ransom’s cheeks, or ruffle his hair, and no matter how little Ransom understood, he always felt included in the joke. “-see the flesh-numbing rot that infects them all!”  And he’d wriggle his fingers like maggots, and Ransom would shriek in disgust.

‘The doctor’s HUAW,’ he’d called it. The strange dilation of time that followed them like a miasma. They moved as if through molasses, both in Ransom’s memory and his father’s descriptions. Every turn was ponderous, every question slurred. And yet, despite their lackadaisical air, there was a banked urgency to them that never subsided. It always took a millennium for them to ask how he’d been doing, if there were any concerns, and before Ransom’s father could answer they were already out of the door for what might be minutes or hours. They were forever clattering away on keyboard or tablet or phone. Ransom sat with his father for long stretches of silence in their offices as if they weren’t even there, waiting as they scrolled through, presumably, every dentist appointment and chiropractic visit his father had ever had since he managed to get insurance. They asked a thousand questions, and rolled idly about on their stools without listening to the answers, and then asked if perhaps he’d tried exercising. 

“HUAW.” He’d say it like an army chant. “Hoo-OW! The doctor’s Hurry Up And Wait.” And his father’s fingers would tangle in the crucifix and the dog tags around his neck. The smell of it hung on every nurse’s scrubs, every roll of cheerful stickers, every stethoscope. 

Hell, but Ransom hated it. Until now, he’d never met a doctor without it. But the distinct lack of that quality was the reason, despite her medical degree, Ransom suspected the residents of Winterset, West Virginia did not tend to think of Flannery O’Shannon as much of a doctor. 

There were other things that separated the good doctor from the few medical practitioners Ransom had worked with in the past, of course. The first and most relevant was her choice of hometown. Baffling, really, but Ransom had to admit it was convenient for him. Isolated, three whole hours from the nearest city with any repute, tucked in a valley between the Old Hawley wilderness and a thousand square miles of barely-settled mountains, Winterset was cheerful, warm, and unnervingly quiet. Every resident knew every other resident - within hours, if you changed your order in the town’s one coffee shop or, heaven forbid, the Mexican restaurant, everyone and their mother knew it. Friendships were a matter of course. It was difficult to bicker over who was at fault in a fender bender when the pastor knew both your wives by name, and would ask you, his face a bottomless pool of kindness, if you would please both come to the front of the chapel that Sunday for prayer, and then to dinner at his house that evening. Conflict was nonexistent - so was excitement. People were chatty when they were drunk, so, with a couple careful bar runs and a layer of concealer, even mystery was nonexistent. 

Except, again, for the medical examiner. 

There was nothing online, the easiest place to dig. Nothing in the town census data, either, so she wasn’t local originally. It wasn’t uncommon for Ransom to run into trouble when digging for details in federal files, but it was uncommon for someone to be so thoroughly unknown. Not a barkeep in the eight towns within two hours drive of Winterset were willing or able to say a single thing about her. Some of them clearly knew of her - one was even willing to admit she’d done an autopsy on his father after a mine collapse. But the general response to her name or her title was silent suspicion. Suspicion of her or suspicion of him, Ransom couldn’t tell. 

He’d managed to scrounge up a few things, though. She doubled as the town’s second veterinarian. She lived in a two-room apartment over a shop somewhere. And, most importantly, her office was tucked away in the basement of the police station, which also doubled as the post office.

So, five days after Killian gave him a one-way bus ride to Backwoods, Nowhere, Ransom descended a wide flight of concrete stairs and turned a corner into a single large room. 

The second reason Ransom couldn’t quite think of O’Shannon as a doctor was the light. Every medical professional he’d ever brought in for examination or consulted for supernatural evidence worked in bright white light, radiating from wide square pools in the ceiling with a barely perceptible flicker. Not so in the combined office and autopsy chamber of Flannery O’Shannon. A low warm yellow light poured from circular lamps, hung from hooks drilled into the concrete ceiling or set on mounts in the walls. It wasn’t dark, per se: Ransom had killed things that lived in the dark, and their holes looked nothing at all like her office. If he had to pick a word to describe it, he’d probably say… 

Intimate. The innocent word snuck up on him like a child in the night, looking for water, and he shoved it away. Dr. O’Shannon was a medical examiner and a member of the Guild of White Hands. Her practice was the cataloguing and dissection of human corpses, and the examination of their causes of death both mundane and supernatural. Her work was brutal and visceral, like the few Guild doctors he’d met before. The atmospheric lighting did not change that. 

The examiner herself was… well, tall. Broad as a barn, swallowed up in the stiff folds of a floor-length white coat. Her face was covered in two pale blue medical masks and a pair of sterile goggles, her hair in a thick braid wrapped neatly in netting, tucked down the back of the coat. Ransom had to stare for a long moment before he caught a single sight of her actual flesh. It was darker than her coat, at least - she was either a Caucasian who spent a good deal of time outside or some other as-of-yet unknown ethnicity. Ransom wondered how well she got on with the predominantly white population of Winterset. 

She looked chiseled, a great ponderous thing ripped unthinkingly from a block of white marble. Like an ancient Roman statue, carved of stone and preserved, frozen in the midst of some aesthetically pleasing motion forever. Could Ransom be a bit further over his head than he realized? Hydra were not uncommon in northern Appalachia - perhaps one had moved south to escape a mining company- 

She moved, and Ransom was startled in spite of himself. No Hurry Up And Wait with her - she began and arrived at the end of each motion with banked strength and careful speed. Only then did Ransom finally notice what she was doing, the full reality of the situation dawning on him. A useful trick, when his mind apprehended information and, judging it harmless in less than an instant, discarded it, him none the wiser. It did him wonders in combat. Here, though, it left him breathless. 

It was in no way a threat, and so he had not noticed the corpse. 

Dr O’Shannon stood, buried up to her double-gloved elbows in the chest cavity of a naked cadaver. Something about the color of the light made the viscera worse to look upon, the colors deepened by the tint, purple shadows, yellow fat, red veins. Ransom felt his chest spasm and swallowed, hard. He would not vomit at this. Not this, of all things. He’d seen bodies before, in worse states of disrepair than this. But the odd combination of the basement, the light, the silence, the doctor’s stillness, the surprise - all left him in a state of bone-deep disorientation. 

“Stop.” The voice ground out of her, like the broken crackle of a scratched record, slowed and pitched down by an intruding finger. Ransom rubbed a hand across the sheathed knife in his jacket and glanced down. 

There was a thick black line painted on the white linoleum floor, outlining a long rectangle in the back half of the basement. Without realizing, he’d wandered forwards into a sterile area. Nodding, he stepped back. O’Shannon hadn’t even looked up. 

He stood silently. Now that he was closer, he realized that she was not entirely still. Instead she hovered over the body like a vulture, hands buried in it, a slight twitching in her forearms betraying the slow deliberate motion of her hands inside the chest cavity. The lungs and a large portion of the woman’s intestines - it was a woman, Ransom realized, and spent a few seconds with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground in embarrassment before his curiosity got the better of him - had been removed and laid carefully aside. Now O’Shannon seemed to be searching for something, the faint, nearly imperceptible squeaking and squelching of her gloved hands the only sound in the open room. 

Eventually, she seemed to find whatever it was she was looking for, because she straightened up and withdrew one hand to grab a pair of claspers from a nearby tray. 

“You are the Guild Hunter.” Again, her voice filled the room like distant thunder. 

Kilian’s dislike of her hadn’t made much sense, Ransom thought, but it did now. He’d assumed it was something about her attitude, or her choice of career. Medical examiners were pariahs by trade, meddling in that which most would prefer remained unmeddled-in. Nobody liked the reminder of their body’s frail mortality, the blunt uncompromising reality of their flesh and organs. But Kilian had worked with other examiners, he knew their methods were necessary. 

No. It hit Ransom like a bullet to the head. Killian’s distaste came not from O’Shannon’s work, but from her place outside the Guild. Her indispensability, and because of it, her freedom to continue her life unruled. He hated her because she did not belong to him. 

Ransom felt a surge of jealousy towards the doctor, followed by a shock of pride. Good. Let the damn man squirm. Any decent man stands in a world among equals and rejoices, because he is not alone in carrying his burdens. But a small, weak, conniving man cannot bear to stand before a wall immovable and be reminded that he is small, and weak, and conniving. 

She probably doesn’t even know how much he hates her, he thought, and finally nodded in response to Dr. O’Shannon’s question. She probably never dives beyond the shallowest currents into the violent squabbling pit that is the Guild. Shit, this job is going to be harder than I thought.

Slowly, eyes still trained on her work, O’Shannon drew one arm out of the woman’s chest cavity to point, the other still wielding the claspers. “Remove your shoes and jacket, please. Wash your hands and arms, above the elbows, soap and water. Hairnet, mask, goggles, apron, and net shoes.” She pointed with bloody glove to a series of cabinets along one wall, near a well-lit desk covered in paper diagrams and scattered books. “You will need gloves, but you will not touch anything unless I specifically allow you to.”

“What,” Ransom muttered, “No ‘Hi, hello, nice to meet you?’” The quiet words carried much further than he’d expected in the open space. Despite his annoyance at her brusque tone, he was already toeing off his shoes. He needed this contact, just as Kilian needed her practice. He couldn’t really afford to jeopardize that for the sake of his pride. Damn it if he didn’t want to, though. 

“... Come quickly. You will want to see this.” O’Shannon didn’t respond to his jibe. Half of him was grateful. It would make this all go much quicker. The other half wanted to see just how far he could push before the damned mask tore. 

Ransom was halfway through thoroughly washing his hands and arms when Dr. O’Shannon spoke again. He was taking extra care with it, working every inch of skin with soap, ensuring she’d have absolutely nothing to complain about, so he missed the first few words and had to look up and over his shoulder. “What?” He bit out. “Could you repeat that?” 

“Her name,” O’Shannon paused for another moment, tilting her head in such a way that Ransom knew her eyes were boring into his behind those goggles. At some point while he’d been turned away, she’d pulled a white sheet up to cover the cadaver’s bottom half. “-is Katie Freida Dalle. She was forty six. She ran the library in the town of Whitmer, directly to the south of here. Every two weeks, she would send a crate of books by truck to the town center, and they would distribute them to the nearby kids.” 

Ransom listened in a sort of bemused rapture, his anger slowly fizzling, as O’Shannon told him everything she knew about Katie Frieda Dalle. Some of it was medical. She’d had chronic Lyme disease as a child. She’d met her husband - an autoimmune specialist - through a Lyme support group. Her blood type was B negative. She’d dyed her hair within the last week. Most of it, though, was information Ransom would never have thought to learn, much less known how to acquire. Her favorite color. Her orders at restaurants. If Katie had been a local, he would have been less surprised - everyone in Winterset knew everyone else, information was bound to get around. But Katie was from Whitmer, a solid forty minutes away. There were two other towns closer than that to Winterset. One of them had a library. 

Maybe they were friends? Ransom thought. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall anything from his bar crawls that could connect the two.

O’Shannon eventually ushered him over to stand beside her to the side, watching as she worked. She never stopped talking, but she never rambled either. Her voice ground on, hoarse, but uncompromising. Each piece of information led cleanly into the next, like a carefully crafted essay, or a military debriefing, and Ransom did his best to take it all in. She seemed a good woman, Katie. Firm in her values, a regular at a Catholic church an hour or so further from Winterset, a staunch supporter of the literacy of the surrounding towns. She spent her weekends teaching the coal miner’s kids to read.

“-time in Greece with her husband. Brought in by police officials after finding her dead in the woods behind her property, a piece of about twenty acres that contains the oldest known black oak in a radius of nearly four hundred miles-” 

Ransom jumped at the opportunity. “Found dead? Do they know what killed her?” They probably did. Katie hadn’t shown up on his list of suspected victims, he knew enough about her now to know he’d remember if she had. But if he could segue into a discussion of causes of death, he might get something truly useful out of O’Shannon. 

The doctor didn’t look up from her work. Instead, carefully wielding a pair of tweezers, she lowered her hand back into the dark hole of Kate’s chest cavity. “In a moment, yes.” 

Ransom blinked. “What?” 

Without warning, O’Shannon’s hand shot out of Katie’s chest cavity, lifting something up to the light, firmly grasped in the tweezers. Ransom watched as a tiny white wormlike thing writhed in the light, thrashing once, twice, before shuddering and curling in on itself. 

Before his very eyes, it crumbled entirely to dust and fell from O’Shannon’s grasp. By the time they would have reached the floor, even the ashes were gone. 

“...Do you know why wolfsbane has its name?” O’Shannon asked, voice flat. 

Ransom had to swallow hard before he could force his wildly beating heart out of his throat. “No. No I don’t. What the hell was that thing?” 

O’Shannon carefully set the tweezers down and turned to Ransom, fully stepping back from the body for the first time. “Wolfsbane, also known as monkshood, or aconite, is a poisonous plant. It was used historically as an anti-parasitic medication, because it killed the parasites only slightly faster than it killed the patients.” She rolled her gloves down her arms, folded them skillfully into one another, and dropped them into a biohazard bucket. “What is the infection vector for lycanthropy?” 

Ransom took a deep breath and turned away from the cadaver. “Bites. ‘Any bite where the teeth and saliva have sufficient time to sink into the flesh is a possible supernatural bridge,’ at least, according to the Guild. If not treated immediately, the infection is… irreversible.” 

He was going to say ‘fatal.’ But most professionals didn’t consider being a werewolf the same as being dead, and he wasn’t sure how well his technical inaccuracy would fly here. Honestly, he wasn’t sure now how anything would fly here. He’d walked in expecting the classic sedate medical consultant, perhaps a bit of an eccentric personality considering Kilian’s distaste. Nothing was going according to plan now. 

“Wrong.” O’Shannon pushed the goggles up her head, back turned to Ransom as she rifled through papers on her desk. “The vector is an organism, protea lycanthropus. They’re interesting little creatures. The Guild doesn’t classify them as a full Supernatural, just the people they inhabit. That’s why it’s treatable, if you’re quick. The near-microscopic eggs are laid in the saliva glands in monthly cycles.” 

“... holy shit. That’s why it’s more dangerous to get bit around the moon.” Ransom said, almost without realizing he meant to speak. “It’s a parasitic infection.” 

O’Shannon nodded. “Yes. The moon worms are blatantly magical, of course - their tendency to disintegrate in certain wavelengths of light, or grow exponentially more powerful when the moon happens to fall in a certain spatial alignment. Their unnatural healing abilities when not exposed to silver. But they only impart that magic to their hosts if they deem it necessary. If it benefits their survival.” 

All at once, the proverbial elephant in the room came crashing down on Ransom. He glanced again at the peeled-open body - at Katie. Broken and gutted on a medical table in a random basement. Nearly hairless, thin nails cracked and bloodied. Utterly human. 

“The parasites moved quickly away from her extremities and settled her vitamin-rich internal organs, likely in the hopes that they would be consumed by… well, carrion feeders. They don’t do that in a host with a chance at survival. Katie was not bitten with the intention of turning, nor did she live long enough to have the chance of biting someone else. Her murder was - likely for other reasons.” 

The hesitation was almost unnoticeable, but Ransom knew liars. He knew half-truths and careful omissions. O’Shannon knew why Katie had died, and she didn’t want him to know. Or... 

Ransom considered the body in front of them. She was female. She could be attractive, Ransom thought, if she were whole. Perhaps O’Shannon didn’t mind him knowing. Perhaps she just didn’t want to say it aloud. Damn dogs. This was why he did this job. 

“So… why go to the trouble of finding the worm?” Ransom turned back to the doctor, who was bent nearly double to write something in a thick clothbound journal on her desk. “The bite’s pretty damn distinctive. Why…” And he gestured to the open body on the table before them. 

“Not every werewolf hides so poorly as to be revealed by a bite mark.” O’Shannon turned to a file cabinet, set to the opposite side of the desk to the bookshelf, creating an alcove of sorts. It rattled loudly as she pulled it open, and Ransom’s eyes widened at the sheer number of tattered manilla folders within it. She removed one, nestled between two other folders labeled ‘Bites: Wight’ and ‘Bites: Water Horse’ and flipped it open. 

Inside were a few neatly stacked groups of thick laminated photographs, paperclipped to information cards. She thumbed through them, fingers swift and practiced, and Ransom’s eyes widened as he realized just how large her hands were. Nearly the width of the folder themselves, they nevertheless flicked deftly through the pictures until she found the stack she was looking for and removed it, offering it for him to look at. He took it, only then realizing that his hands were still gloved. 

The pictures were… well. Brutal was an inadequate word. They were visceral. Some of them were difficult to parse, they were so bloody, and some of them were oddly cold, torn flesh in hard lighting taken only after there was no more blood to bleed out of the open gashes. 

“Those are bite wounds.” O’Shannon said, and Ransom scoffed. 

“No teeth could make these.” 

“They didn’t.” She reached out to turn over a page, and Ransom was met with what looked like evidence photographs from a crime scene, cataloguing several weapons. A few knives, a meat tenderizer, a sawblade. “With enough creativity, even the deepest of bite marks can be turned into something else. And without a clear photograph of a werewolf bite, or some other provided proof beyond reasonable doubt, no Guild-sourced compensatory funding shall be allotted to the victims’ families or estates, and no Guild-sourced investigation will be undertaken.” The last few phrases sounded rote, memorized, even beneath O’Shannon’s toneless, blunt manner of speaking. 

Ransom stared for a long moment at the page of weapons, then down at the file folder of werewolf bites. There were names appended to each paperclipped stack of pictures. Just the surnames and the first initial, but as he scanned through them, he recognized a few at the front. 

“You were the one that brought me here, weren’t you?” He finally handed the pictures back. O’Shannon didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t respond, either. That was enough, really. “You’re responsible for all those death reports. That’s why Kilian was so damned impatient with this whole thing. You’re… filing insurance claims. A lot of them. You’re proving that these people weren’t killed by some random serial killer, even when it’d be easy for the Guild to overlook them. You’re making them do their job.” 

O’Shannon’s eyes shone, with passion, maybe, or grief, or fury, or all three. They were round, deeply set in her face, and both her brows and lashes were thick and disheveled, hairs sticking every which way. In the low light, it took a moment before Ransom could even tell that they were grey, and not black as pitch. Her pupils were huge, nearly swallowing the thin rim of color around them, as if she stood in complete and utter darkness. 

“There are currently fewer than five hundred medical examiners in the United States of America. I am the only one who lives within a hundred miles of southern Appalachia. Every strange death, every murder, every poisoning, every opioid death, every hiker dead due to exposure. They all come through my lab. I meet every single one of them. It is my job-” And at this, she raps one finger firmly against the center of Ransom’s chest, “to ensure they are spoken for. To ensure their families know how they died, and what, or who, killed them. To guarantee, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the truth is known. I am doing my job. Will that be a problem, Ransom Ozies, Guild-approved Hunter of the Supernatural? Or will I continue to do my job alone?” 

Face burning under the weight of her stare, Ransom glanced down. His eyes caught on a glint of metal tucked half into her scrubs. A simple cross, wrought in iron, probably, or brass. The smell of tobacco and hand sanitizer filled his nose. He stepped forward, firmly pressing the photographs into O’Shannon’s hands.

“I look forward to workin’ with you.” He grinned up at her, and saw her shoulders slump a bit in relief. “Let’s catch this sonofa bitch.” 

[moltengoldveins]

Excerpts from Draft 1 of Ransom and the Speaker’s Carrion -

Envisioning a doctor of the modern day is an amusing mental exercise, if one is of a vigorous enough constitution to hold to the principle that it is better to laugh than cry. This might seem a strange assertion at first. The thing that breaks at once upon the mind  like a bottle to the head at the sound of the word ‘doctor’ is a white lab coat. Perhaps, if one has a penchant for the fantastical, a shock of wild hair and a mad grin.

But then, I did not say that envisioning a doctor was a process that would bring a sane man to laughter and a tired one to weeping. I said a modern doctor, and now the image becomes quite another thing altogether. 

The faces of modern doctors are many and varied, broad and narrow, pudgy and sharp, dark and light - a few of them are even women! But despite the modern days’ enamorment with false variety in our doctors, we can, with the discerning eye of any four year old, see the flesh-numbing rot that infects them all. 

The doctor’s HUAW, I call it, the strange dilation of time that follows them like a miasma. They move as if through molasses, every turn ponderous, every question slurred. And yet, despite their lackadaisical air, there is a banked urgency to them that never subsides. It takes a millennium for them to ask how you’ve been doing, if there are any concerns, and before you can answer they are already out of the door for what might be minutes or hours. They are forever clattering away on keyboard or tablet or phone, and yet you sit for long stretches of silence in their office as if you weren’t even there, waiting as they scroll through, presumably, your every dentist appointment and chiropractic visit since you managed to get insurance. They ask a thousand questions, and roll idly about on their stools without listening to the answers, and then ask if perhaps you’d tried loosing weight. HUAW. The doctor’s Hurry Up And Wait. It hangs on every nurse’s scrubs, every roll of cheerful stickers, every stethoscope. And the distinct lack of this quality is the reason, I think, despite her medical degree, the residents of Winterset, West Virginia did not tend to think of Flannery O’Shannon as much of a doctor. 

[moltengoldveins]

real quick debrief for the mutuals:

Ransom and the Speaker’s Carrion is a novel i am writing now, because I hate myself and cannot bear to allow myself free time. It is technically a vampire romance. It is also technically a supernatural horror/thriller .It is also technically a series of essays on Christianity. It is also technically a murder mystery. It’s also technically a comedy a la Hitchhikers Guide.

it follows Ransom Ozies, a washed-up thirty something vampire hunter who’s damn good at his job and not much else, as he investigates a series of strange murders and disappearances in the Appalachian wildernesses of northern West Virginia. Working for an organization of monster hunters, he’s introduced by them to a medical examiner and autopsy performer who lives in a small town near the center of the disappearances, Flannery O’Shannon. As he investigates, learns more about the supernatural creatures who may or may not live around the town, and works ever more closely with Flannery and her roommate Selene Loor, the federal land manager for the surrounding wilderness, he begins to wonder if perhaps he’s missed something important.

Spoiler alert - he has. The medical examiner is obviously supernatural. She’s also catholic. This is enough cognitive dissonance that Ransom cannot comprehend it without adjusting his worldview, something he is staunchly opposed to doing. Selene’s obviously in on it. And of course, once Ransom does come to the realization that his coworker is supernatural, a comedic series of misunderstandings and preconceived notions reveals that there are a werewolf and a vampire in town and convinces him that he’s certain he knows who - Flannery, the tall, broad, flannel-wearing butcher of a medical examiner who cuts wood in her spare time, is the werewolf, while Selene, the pale, rail-thin goth who likes bats, is the vampire.

this is, in fact, incorrect. You can imagine the shenanigans that follow.

[moltengoldveins]

things I am so so so excited about adding to Ransom and Speaker but also I am coming to terms with the fact that in all likelihood I will not get to bc it is important to kill your darlings when necessary and this would be a heck of a lot of infodumping-

Vampirism is a prion disease. It doesn’t rewrite your genetic code so much as transfer the data onto another hard-drive, vampire cells are almost entirely identical to human cells on the surface but made of completely different chemicals and proteins. This contributes to a widespread belief in the supernaturalist circles that vampires die at infection, and the remaining organism is in absolutely no way a human being, though it may look and sound like one. vampires are to be referred to as ‘it’ and given titles as opposed to names. Thralls, or vampires of various types under the coven authority of a head vampire, are classified as additional body parts of the same large creature. A hive mind with a queen, as opposed to a family or pack structure. Thus, if one were to encounter a thrall titled Wander, made by a central vampire titled The Lady, you would call it ‘The Lady’s Wander.”

Vampires require blood to drink not because of nutrition but because the prion disease’s main negative effect is the inability for the bone marrow to generate blood cells. They require constant transfusion in order to function. It’s unclear exactly how vampire cells are compatible with human blood cells and how the oxygen transfer works exactly, but it does work.

it is easier to identify a male vampire than a female one. This is because the old dead blood the vampire has been using for a few weeks needs to be expelled from the body, and the males are forced to regurgitate it for a few days each month. Females have a built-in method for regularly expelling blood from the body - they have heavy period flows and that’s about it.

there is much theological confusion around vampires. Largely due to their inability to enter some houses of Jewish, Catholic, and Christian worship, and their difficulty interacting with sacred images or sacraments. It’s unclear why that would bother them at all - most supernatural beings have limitations, and many of them are even religious, but the limitations seem mostly linked to the faith of the religious community. Not the case for vampires. A good rule of thumb is - if an individual is a vampire, they will likely be pained by the proximity of or physical contact with church memorabilia, and be slowed or repelled entirely by violations of most ancient hospitality laws. Other than that, their weaknesses seem to vary by individual.

Werewolves do not necessarily fall into a pack structure based on actual wolf behavior - their packs are rigidly defined and usually mirror local societal patterns, but rarely correspond one-to-one. Often, pack structure seems deliberately opposite the predominant social structure of the surrounding culture, and the methods by which these packs form and self regulate are always brutal and dangerous.

everything I have just written above is based on the unbiased professional data collected by Guild of the White Hand, professional cataloguers and exterminators of supernatural phenomena, and should be taken absolutely 100% seriously as the naked truth 👍

[moltengoldveins]

ransom and the speaker’s carrion character sketches bc I cannot functionally write without art

Tumblr as always crunches quality plz tap and zoom in at ur leisure-

[moltengoldveins]

shoutout to Ransom and the Speaker’s Carrion for not only being the first novel I’ve managed to work on where I unironically believe that God exists and directly influences the world of the story but also is the first novel where I’ve worked my theology into the world building. Why are some vampires repelled by Catholicism? Boy howdy do I have some surprises for you-

[moltengoldveins]

aight basic character breakdowns bc I need the mental stability that comes with having this written down somewhere oki doki (so so so many spoilers head if somehow one of my five mutuals cares)

Flannery O’Shannon - also known by the Guild as the Red Speaker, a werewolf thrall of the vampire Carrion, though the Guild doesn’t know they’re the same individual. What the Guild also doesn’t know? She’s the vampire. Carrion is the werewolf thrall. Born about 45AD, turned in her late forties/early fifties, wandered Egypt, Northern Africa, and the Middle East until the early Middle Ages when she moved to Europe and settled in a town near a small monastery. Is exceedingly…. Catholic? Maybe? Can a vampire be Catholic? A question, she, I, and everyone else has been asking for centuries. Likes embroidery and music, but cannot sing due to health complications.

Jericho Dale - Former professional Guild vampire hunter, now retired due to his disagreements with the Guild’s changing policies (complete degradation in morals) and working as a jeweler and silversmith in the Appalachian Mountains. Knows Flannery as the nearest Guild contact, and someone willing to smuggle his (technically contraband) protective charms and functional supernatural jewelry out to both guild and non-guild hunters. Can spit 10 yards, drink an average of five men under the table, and is a surprisingly skilled cello player.

Ransom Ozies - Guild hunter, werewolf specialist, grew up in Chicago dealing with the pack-gangs there and cleaning up small scale supernatural issues on the side, selfies in the sewer system, kobolds in the subways, that sort of thing. Highly skilled investigator with a passion for silver bullets, a vicious sense of right and wrong, and a damn near unstoppable resolve to kill every single werewolf he can find. Enjoys jazz, good food, and tea.

Selene Loor - The ‘vampire’ Carrion. Born in the late 1400s and infected with lycanthropy at a young age, she met Red after her transformation and the two became close friends. She was very nearly executed for witchcraft after her transformation was discovered, but was instead rescued by Red, who made her a thrall in order to heal her severe injuries. She works as the land manager for the wilderness and the various preserves of northern West Virginia. She’s a contortionist, a goth, and a passionate juggler. She also plays the viola.

ransom and the speaker’s carrion character sketches bc I cannot functionally write without art

Tumblr as always crunches quality plz tap and zoom in at ur leisure-