Werebeasts Ñ are night creatures resembling an unnatural cross between a sapient creature and a beast, cursed to transform every full moon into a dangerous and bloodthirsty beast form. The curse can be contracted by incurring the wrath of one's patron deity or from another werebeast. Werebeasts are hated and feared throughout much of the world, posing a great risk to the player.
Gargoyles and grotesques: Parliament Hill’s sinister sentinels
The misshapen demons scattered through Centre Block, West Block and East Block are one of Parliament’s more bizarre architectural features. Their pedigree dates back to the Middle Ages and, no, they’re not all gargoyles.
The Birth of the Gentle Meme - Nightflight
Haints, Hollers, and Hoodoo
A dark spirit lives on your porch,” the medium told me. Excuse me? Prickles of dread and fear blossomed in my chest. What the hell am I supposed to do about that? I was only beginning my journey in…
A Canticle to the Waterbirds
Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes,North on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough Pacific surge;You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack written on sandbars there of your presence;Grebes and pelicans; you comber-picking scoters and you shorelong gulls;All you keepers of the coastline north of here to the Mendocino beaches;All you beyond upon the cliff-face thwarting the surf at Hecate Head;Hovering the under-surge where the cold Columbia grapples at the bar;North yet to the Sound, whose islands float like a sown flurry of chips upon the sea;Break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted beaks unmade for songAnd say a praise up to the Lord.And you freshwater egrets east in the flooded marshlands skirting the sea-level rivers, white one-legged watchers of shallows;Broad-headed kingfishers minnow-hunting from willow stems on meandering valley sloughs;You too, you herons, blue and supple-throated, stately, taking the air majestical in the sun-flooded San Joaquin,Grading down on your belted wings from the upper lights of sunset,Mating over the willow clumps or where the flatwater rice fields shimmer;You killdeer, high night-criers, far in the moon-suffusion sky;Bitterns, sand-waders, all shore-walkers, all roost-keepers,Populates of the ‘dobe cliffs of the Sacramento;Open your water-dartling beaks,And make a praise up to the Lord.For you hold the heart of His mighty fastnesses,And shape the life of His indeterminate realms.You are everywhere on the lonesome shores of His wide creation.You keep seclusion where no man may go, giving Him praise;Nor may a woman come to lift like your cleaving flight her clear contralto songTo honor the spindrift gifts of His soft abundance.You sanctify His hermitage rocks where no holy priest may kneel to adore, nor holy nun assist;And where His true communion-keepers are not enabled to enter.And well may you say His praises, birds, for your waysAre verved with the secret skills of His inclinations,And your habits plaited and rare with the subdued elaboration of His intricate craft;Your days intent with the direct astuteness needful for His outworking,And your nights alive with the dense repose of His infinite sleep.You are His secretive charges and you serve His secretive ends,In His clouded, mist-conditioned stations, in His murk,Obscure in your matted nestings, immured in His limitless ranges.He makes you penetrate through dark interstitial joinings of His thicketed kingdoms,And keep your concourse in the deeps of His shadowed world.Your ways are mild but earnest, your manners grave,Your customs carefully schooled to the note of His serious mien.You hold the prime condition of His clean creating,And the swift compliance with which you serve His minor meansSpeaks of the constancy with which you hold Him.For what is your high flight forever going home to your first beginnings,But such a testament to your devotion?You hold His outstretched world beneath your wings, and mount upon His storms,And keep your sheer wind-lidded sight upon the vast perspectives of His mazy latitudes.But mostly it is your way you bear existence wholly within the context of His utter will and are untroubled.Day upon day you do not reckon, nor scrutinize tomorrow, nor multiply the nightfalls with a rash concern,But rather assume each instant as warrant sufficient of His final seal.Wholly in Providence you spring, and when you die you look on death in clarity unflinched,Go down, a clutch of feather ragged upon the brush;Or drop on water where you briefly lived, found food,And now yourselves made food for His deep current-keeping fish, and then are gone:Is left but the pinion-feather spinning a bit on the uproilWhere lately the dorsal cut clear air.You leave a silence. And this for you suffices, who are not of the ceremonials of man,And hence are not made sad to now forego them.Yours is of another order of being, and wholly it compels.But may you, birds, utterly seized in God’s supremacy,Austerely living under His austere eye—Yet may you teach a man a necessary thing to know,Which has to do of the strict conformity that creaturehood entails,And constitutes the prime commitment all things share.For God has given you the imponderable grace to be His verification,Outside the mulled incertitude of our forensic choices;That you, our lesser in the rich hegemony of Being,May serve as testament to what a creature is,And what creation owes.Curlews, stilts and scissor-tails, beachcomber gulls,Wave-haunters, shore-keepers, rockhead-holders, all cape-top vigilantes,Now give God praise.Send up the strict articulation of your throats,And say His name.
Millenarianism
The name is from the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelations. Christ has just defeated the Beast, and cast him and his false prophet into a "lake of fire burning with brimstone". Christ has also slaughtered the army of the beast, including the kings of the earth, slaying them with a sword which "proceeded out of his mouth". (A conservation-minded angel had earlier called together the birds of the air, that they might "eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great".)
Lunacid
Cast into the Great Well, unwanted by the world above. You delve the dark in search of the Old One, your last salvation. Lunacid is a dark fantasy dungeon crawler inspired by Shadow Tower and King’s Field.
Transylvania's Heritage on Instagram: "SHAPE SHIFTING WEREWOLF CAPTURED ON CAMERA IN TRANSYLVANIA? This week in Bihor, a farmer I know personally heard his shepherd dogs barking as a danger warning, on his land early evening. He took his basic thermal camera and saw was a pack of wolves that alerted his dogs. Went in to get help as many animals are killed by wolves in the area, but when he returned the wolves left. Only later upon looking at the camera footage he saw what it looks like a man figure coming out of a wolf and wolves leaving, claiming to be a werewolf shapeshifting. He claimed to me he even knows who the "strigoi" (evil spirit) is and that he is known do such things as "priculici" (werewolf) in the area. We also call these werevilf like spirits "moroi" in our region. You make what you want out of this video, I posted it here for debate, because whatever your belief is, this is worth seing."
787 likes, 54 comments - transylvania.heritage on February 22, 2025: "SHAPE SHIFTING WEREWOLF CAPTURED ON CAMERA IN TRANSYLVANIA? This week in Bihor, a farmer I know personally heard his shepherd dogs barking as a danger warning, on his land early evening. He took his basic thermal camera and saw was a pack of wolves that alerted his dogs. Went in to get help as many animals are killed by wolves in the area, but when he returned the wolves left. Only later upon looking at the camera footage he saw what it looks like a man figure coming out of a wolf and wolves leaving, claiming to be a werewolf shapeshifting. He claimed to me he even knows who the "strigoi" (evil spirit) is and that he is known do such things as "priculici" (werewolf) in the area. We also call these werevilf like spirits "moroi" in our region. You make what you want out of this video, I posted it here for debate, because whatever your belief is, this is worth seing.".
A Bite of the Forbidden Fruit - notes from shreyan
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of a forme…
Experiments with Monstrousness
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said; ‘I deeply sympathize’
Choose Your Own Monster
Introducing Monstrous Times, the magazine of strange rules
Gargoyle
In architecture, and specifically Gothic architecture, a gargoyle is a carved or formed grotesque with a spout designed to convey water from a roof and away from the side of a building, thereby preventing it from running down masonry walls and eroding the mortar between. Architects often used multiple gargoyles on a building to divide the flow of rainwater off the roof to minimize potential damage from rainstorms. A trough is cut in the back of the gargoyle and rainwater typically exits through the open mouth. Gargoyles are usually elongated fantastical animals because their length determines how far water is directed from the wall. When Gothic flying buttresses were used, aqueducts were sometimes cut into the buttress to divert water over the aisle walls.
