#folkloric inspiration

[bookmothic-dyke]

Chest heaving. Heart thrumming. Panic burns the edges of her mind. Hooves crashing through gnarled roots, ears fluttering in a panic, and dark eyes, frantic. Blue-green smears pelt, as hungry maws camber down the hillside. She’s lost. The dark woods leave little light. As her scent trails behind, copper and sweet. Mud splattering.

Hunger mounting.

Fear sinking

The hind breying.

Eyes wide. She sees me.

Crunch.

[ominous-faechild]

This is a continuation post to my explanation of The Faewildes in my writing!

If you'd like to read this, I would strongly recommend starting with part 1! However, it's not the end of the world if you don't, you'll just be lacking a bit of context. Enjoy regardless!

Fair warning: long post!

Why aren't the Faewildes "Real"?

Obviously, the Faewildes are real. They exist and have been plaguing the Real World since the destruction of the Old World. So why aren't they "real"?

When I say "real", I mean that it's (relatively) unchanging and most likely unassociated with magic. The Faewilde Planes are fluid, constantly shifting and changing. Most aren't tethered to any one place, or at least shift around in "location" more than a real place should. So they're not "real" simply because they don't follow the rules of what "real" things should.

Where are the Faewildes?

Well, right here. And... right there. Actually, everywhere!

The Faewildes exist parallel to Reality to a point that realistically, nobody should ever see or enter them. Except... people do? Hm.

As I said before, the Faewildes were formed by countless cracks in Reality. Originally, it was a primordial soup that swept over the Real World, absorbing it and getting absorbed into it. But it's been a long time since then, and the world's done a lot of work sorting itself out. A lot of land has escaped from the Faewildes, settling into Reality wherever it was parallel to at its time of escape, and now makes up the continents and islands known to exist within the Real World.

However, the Faewildes still exist--they're just a lot less solid (or... real 🤔) now that they've lost their ingredients. Now, the soupy Faewildes are primarily broth.

The individual Planes within constantly move around within "the Faewildes", sometimes trading places, sometimes overlapping, sometimes merging, and other times completely destroying each other. But that's a subject for another day.

Due to the shifting, the Plane parallel to Reality could be different from day to day even if you never move from the same spot... and vice versa. To equate this to Our World--say, one day, you're living in a small town in the United States. You accidentally slip into the Faewildes and, shit!!! You saw the portal you came through, you need to find it again and escape!!

So you do.

And you emerge in Beijing, China.

Make it better! Somehow, it's 1652.

Oh, yeah. There's Time Fuckery.

So, you've gotten displaced in time by the Faewildes.

Congratulations! You're never finding your way back. Trust me, you're lucky to have gotten out alive. Don't bother going back in. Y'know... if you even can. Those portals don't usually last for long.

You know those fairy tales where people interact with the fairies, visit them or whatever, and return to their world to find out that an incredible amount of time has passed? Sometimes it's even played for a "oops, time's catching up to you!" and they, like, get Dusted like Peter in Infinity War? (Okay I'm accidentally making too many superhero references now 😂😅)

Yeah, well, GUESS WHO EATS THAT STUFF UP LIKE A STARVING WAR CRIMINAL!?!?

(Me. The answer's me.)

Due to the nature of the Faewildes and how they came from Chaos literally shattering reality, their "time" doesn't work the same as in the Real World. While, to them, time still flows in one direction, the times their Planes connect to in the Real World are disconnected.

To Doctor Who fans, it's not too dissimilar from the Doctor and River Song's meetings! While there's technically no interruption in their lives (or they live from, say, 1 to 30 years old), the other might meet them at 30 first, then 3, then 24, then 18--hopefully you get it!

(I'm making way too many references right now, forgive me. 😅🙏)

Point is, while each (the Faewildes vs Real World) feels like they have a linear timeline, they don't meet up at "the same times", leading to a disconnect that can make people get lost in time.

But that's okay!

People don't tend to survive getting lost in the Faewildes, anyways!

As much as I've enjoyed talking about the Faewildes, I think this is a good stopping point for this post! I'm getting a little tired of explaining them, so I'm going to take a break, work on some other things, and maybe get back to finishing this in a day or few!

Feel free to leave a comment, they're pure serotonin for me!!! 😊

Part 1 |

Divider from @cafekitsune

[spookyasmr]

[gatoburr0]

Hehe hiii samurai shiver Hii um!!

Also yes I designed the tattoos from scratch and I still gotta do the one on her back 😪

[serpentface]

The pylidaigh, a type of vampiric snow ghost, as imagined in folklore in and around the Highlands.

This is a ghost believed to come into being when a person dies in the snow and their body is not found before their soul (still trapped without its funeral rites) 'freezes' inside of it. The body then reanimates into a pylidaigh's twisted form. It looks like someone who slowly died of starvation, just a thin layer of flesh over bones. Its skin is as white as the snow itself, so pale it can blend seamlessly into a blizzard. Most of its body appears subtly stretched and lanky, save for its exceptionally unsubtle long, skinny arms, which drag on the ground behind it when it walks. After a big meal of blood, its belly swells like the abdomen of a tick.

A pylidaigh can only tread across snow and ice, and so doorways and windows are best kept clear of snowfall during the winter in order to prevent it from reaching inside. It mostly comes out to hunt during blizzards when there is little that can prevent it from catching its victims.

In spite of its fragile appearance, a pylidaigh is supernaturally strong, and can run at great speeds when it wants to. No mortal weapons can pierce its body, nor can any bonds known to craftsmen hold it in place. It is usually said that chains forged like iron but made out of ice can bind a pylidaigh and render it immobile, but this smithing technique remains tragically elusive to the average joe.

This ghost is either cast as a wildly dangerous but tragic figure, or one that is more simply malicious. In either case, it is described as experiencing nothing but bitter cold. It shivers endlessly. It retains distant memories of what it was to be alive, and it is motivated by a futile desperation to experience the feeling of warmth again.

In more sympathetic framings, it is described as using its freaky gibbon arms to capture its victims and pull them into an embrace, rather innocently trying to warm itself against their body. This inevitably fails, and the embrace becomes a bone crushing squeeze. When that too fails to warm the ghost, it rips out the person's throat and drinks their blood until the victim is as cold and drained as the pylidaigh itself.

In other cases, this more pitiable narrative of a ghost seeking warmth with no comprehension of its actions is discarded in favor of making it purely monstrous. Here it is a type of vampire with an insatiable thirst, practically a physical manifestation of the worst of winter itself. Some tales acknowledge both variants, suggesting a pylidaigh's violent attempts to warm itself may be initially devoid of malice, but turns into an act of furious jealousy of the warmth of the living after years of suffering.

The only (more or less) surefire method to permanently kill a roaming pylidaigh involves trapping it with fire. They are attracted to any source of heat, and will attempt to warm themselves with the flames (if not tempted away by a juicy living human body). The fire itself cannot kill them (as the sheer cold of their body is more powerful even than flame) but they can be trapped if kept near the fire long enough for the snow it depends upon to melt. This does not kill the pylidaigh either. The monster will remain in stuck in place (and potentially become a threat again if it snows more) for the duration of the winter. Only when the spring comes and all the snow melts does it revert into a normal human carcass (though mysteriously invulnerable to decay), at which point it can be cremated.

Pylidaigh in the wilds also revert to a human corpse during the snowless seasons, but will roam again each following winter unless it is burnt in the interim. It is of critical importance that any human corpse found in high mountain pasture is cremated- not only out of respect for the poor soul trapped as an earthbound ghost, but to prevent the threat of the possible dormant pylidaigh emerging next winter.

[maxyvert]

👻Ghost Lady process👻

The footage waited years for me, and finally it could become a lil video. >Finished illustration here<

[lyingtomythrpist]

[midnightsslut]

actually midnights is ‘persist and resist the temptation to ask you, if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?’ in album form

[imbecominggayer]

Creating The Mythology For Writing

This is the topic that @melda0m3 has request of me with the specific quote as: "How to write legends about gods? I have my whole god system and their basic lore, but can never figure out how to make legends and such"

So, following this advice post, I will only be talking about how to create legends for your established gods and I will not be talking about how to create gods.

Writing Legends

Legends, as defined by a quick google searchl, are a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.

Legends are also classified as myths since myths are traditional stories that were meant to explain a physical or social phenomena.

For example, the "marriage" between Hades And Persephone was meant to explain seasons as Demeter(the goddess of harvest) destroyes all the plants when Persephone is in the underworld for six months.

Using the real-life reason for legends and myth exist can help provide a clearer, more concise, guideline to make use of.

Of course, your characters won't discuss every single legend within the story so you need to write the legends which will be noteworthy to the plot.

For example, you can highlight the mythology that explains why your characters have inhuman characteristics and why {SOMETHING} is happening.

However, mythology doesn't only exist around the natural. Legends are also weaved around battles, important individuals, and other such things.

This is due to the fact that legends are often the most influencial piece of propaganda within the world. Legends often serve to disparate certain communities within a conflict as failing to win the cover of God.

However, this propaganda also serves to paint certain individuals in an almost heavenly light where their ability to present themselves as a seemingly supernatural creature provides untold benefits for them. A real-life example of this is the Legend of King Arthur.

HOW IS IT APPLICABLE FOR YOU(Story Ideas) ?

Characters have a vested interest in making themselves appear better than they actually are. They may attempt to utilize legends in order to appear like they are God's favorite child.

Countries have a desire to always appear victorious and idealized. This can create it's own sort of reflection chamber where exaggerate stories of grandeur can create a mutation of beliefs so profound that when your characters step outside of the country, reality is vastly different.

Gods are the most likely to manipulate legends to cast their enemies in an unlikeable light while portraying themselves as perfect. This can lead to a highly complicated hodge-podge of contradictory information.

I hope I did well by you @melda0m3 :)

[chimeride]

Unicorn, the 255th Known One

[toddandersonn]

Alright, I'm trying to see if there's any correlation. So, Swifties reblog this with your favorite pop album, your favorite country album, and your favorite folk/alternative album (you can count the Anthology tracks as a separate album if you want to put them in this category)

[thelunarsystemwrites]

Solemn God.

Finally drew Lunarst again, he's just watching over his mortals. I know who the other two gods are gonna be, I just need to draw them 😭

[ominous-faechild]

Hello!!!!

For the WIP Title Tag, I would love to know more about The Faewildes if you feel so inclined!!

OH BOY, THE QUESTION I'VE BEEN MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO ANSWERING!!!! >:DDDD

Forgive me for taking a while to get to this, I've been busy and oh boy, does it have a lot to unpack and explain! And, heh, as I just "alluded" to... it's one of my favorite things in all of my writing! 🥰😙👌

I mean... "ominous-feychild" is a direct reference to them. 😏🤣

Fair warning: long post!

THE FAEWILDES!!!!

Let's break down the name. "Fae" refers to faeries. "Wildes"... well that's obvious. Must be a wild place, right? Except... why is it plural?

To my fellow DnD fans, it might ring some bells. Yes, it is almost a direct rip of the Feywild plane. Except... next to nothing like it. 🤭

There's a lot to explain about the Faewildes, which is kinda why I keep dancing around the subject, haha. In a previous post I just made, I explained what faeries are. Well, I'll get more into them here, but for now: I described them as "sentient clouds of magic." The Faewildes is the birthplace of all faeries, a place of pure, uncontrolled magic swirling about with no care as to what it's doing. Or... quite like a massive cloud of magic. Hm.

The Faewildes' Creation

Nobody can remember exactly when the Faewildes came to be, not even the oldest of the gods. All they can remember is the day the world was destroyed, and the Faewildes emerged through the cracks like a universe-wide tsunami sweeping over all, gods and humans alike.

All the gods know is that it's Chaos's fault. He destroyed the world, likely in a fit of anger with Order. He fucked up everything so entirely that the entire universe cracked. He caused everyone's misery just because... what?

Actually, you know what? Nobody cares! It's Chaos. He does this shit!

And nobody cares that he's in a coma now.

Wait, never mind. We all take that back, we care. Because he needs to stay like that. He fucked up the world, and he can pay for that crime. He deserves it.

Oh, Existences, I think I just got possessed by them for a second. Where were we? OH, RIGHT! The world got destroyed by Chaos, leading to the creation of the Faewildes as it tried "fixing" itself.

See, what Chaos did to destroy the world wasn't any sort of traditional "all natural disasters suddenly occur at once" or zombie apocalypse thing--he broke reality itself. And, unsurprisingly, reality doesn't really like being broken. So the Faewildes has been its way of resolving that issue.

I tend to refer it as a sort of "primordial soup of magic": it holds all the little pieces of the world until they come back together... even if it's not in the way they once were.

What are the Faewildes?

Now to get into the plurality--the Faewildes themselves are plural, though they're usually referred to as "the Faewildes" to those outside because, well... y'know. It's the Soup they're talking about, not the ingredients!

The Faewildes are technically a collection of thousands of Faewilde Planes--and each has their own unique traits, abilities, appearance, rules, etc. Many planes are fragments of what The World Once Was, only submerged in Magic and, most likely, Changed By It. This phenomenon is called "fae-touched", but we'll get into that later, haha.

While some Planes (what are essentially mini-universes) are fragments of The Old World, many more are Pure Faewildes--which means they're pure magic. A lot of them represent one kind of concept or the "essence" of something--like, say, the ocean, laws, nature itself, That One Tree Over There That's Lived Hundreds Of Years, all of bugkind, or the very existence of nonexistence.

This might not all make sense, but that's fine. Some refer to the Faewildes as "the Realm of Madness", and that's for good reason. Not everything has to make sense--a good bit of it follows Magic's dream logic. A realm of Void is simply... nothing.

I don't think I have to explain what happens if you step into it.

Those observant might've noticed something. (Or some things. 😏) Those, er, less observant or less obsessed with trying to figure things out probably didn't. 😂😅 I like to imagine people are interested enough in my stuff to try to figure things out, but that probably isn't the case, haha. Anyways!

I described some of the Planes to be made of "pure magic", they'll represent Something Or Another, and I even used colors on the "concepts" like I use for characters...

And, earlier, I referred to faeries as "sentient clouds of magic".

Oh, boy. You got me right.

Faeries are the Faewildes Themselves

Well, okay--not ALL of the Faewildes is a faerie. Just... a LOT of it.

Faeries are Things and Concepts Brought To Life. Those things have meaning in the magical mess that is the Faewildes, and they'll often develop consciousnesses if they're strong enough. This is how faeries are "sentient clouds of magic", represent concepts or beings, and yet are technically "people" in their own right.

After developing consciousnesses, faeries are able to control everything within their Plane, which I typically refer to as their "domain" or "pocket dimension".

Domain: noun; ✦ an area of territory owned or controlled by a ruler or government ✦ a specified sphere of activity or knowledge

In reference to faeries, their domain is both their "being" (ie, what their consciousness emerged from) and the semi-physical space that they both are and control.

Pocket Dimension--okay I'm sure I don't have to explain this one (and actually just don't have a definition to paste here 😂). My fellow science fans might want to raise the argument about the definition of "dimension", but that's not the point here--it's a term of phrase that people understand, so I use it, haha.

In short: being as they are their domains, faeries within "the Real World" (aka the relatively stable and unchanging world that isn't the Faewildes) are able to teleport into them at will.

Readers of my "Soren Magic Puppet Guardian" post might remember me mentioning that faeries have minor reality warping magic within the Real World. Well... within their domains, they have complete reality warping magic.

To clarify: faeries of things in the Real World don't have complete control over "their being" when it's Real. For example, Soren, noted faerie of the ocean, is not and was never capable of transforming it into, say, a bunch of snakes. However, he could've done so within his domain. While their power may come from Real Things, it is centered within the Faewildes themselves. Despite this, they are still incredibly powerful magic users within the Real World, able to manipulate their domains like a master practitioner.

The fluctuating rules and Existence of the Faewildes is partially because of the inherent reality warping abilities of faeries. They are not their bodies, though they often create them in order to "ground" themselves. Instead, faeries are their domains--and so the domain follows their whims like we blink. Thoughtlessly. It takes effort not to do so, and we'll always inevitably do it before long.

THIS WAS PART 1 OF (PROBABLY) 3!!!

There's a lot to say about the Faewildes, I've already put out a WHOLE BUNCH here, I'm excited to share this and see what y'all have to say, and I don't want to make THAT massive of a post, so I'm going to be splitting this up!!! I'd love to hear what you guys think of this, so feel free to leave comments!

Feel free to reblog and share! 😊

Part 2 |

Tag list: @the-golden-comet @illarian-rambling @ashirisu @urnumber1star @the-letterbox-archives

@aalinaaaaaa @paeliae-occasionally

Divider from @cafekitsune

[spookyasmr]

[delicateivy-swiftgirl]

[show-tunes]

Scrybeswap

I have a lot of scatterbrained design notes for each of them but generally I wanted them to look similar to their original designs but with different themes. I also imagine that they have the same inscribing tools as their original counterparts but just use them differently (i.e. Magnificus paints animals, Leshy takes pictures of people as they're dying/about to die, I'm not sure what the magic equivalent for P03 would be besides maybe a spellbook that copies the essence of things, and Grimora's quill would either "write" code or write directly onto the hardware of robots).