Some Say Magic Died When A Hail Of Shellfire Tore An Ancient God Asunder. Others Say It Died When The
Some say magic died when a hail of shellfire tore an ancient god asunder. Others say it died when the whistle of engines dragged an old world kicking and screaming into a new one. Yet more say it died when the wheels of progress ground the very building blocks of the universe apart into ordered lists and categories. It has been said it died when some long lost soul first harnessed the all consuming light of fire to keep away greater evils that haunted the shadows.
But magic is not dead.
If you venture long enough into the wild lands you can find it, scorched and scarred, battered but not broken. Ancient beings who’s rattling voices sing ballads of fall and fallow; Good People who ask for your name and offer you a deal; silent colossi passing beneath trees that reach to the heavens; beasts that stalked the flickering borders of ancient campfires, and kind travellers who no longer know how long they have wandered these lands.
If you follow the coast you can find it, hear it in faint songs barely distinguishable above the breaking of the waves; see it in the dark shapes that glide over the reefs and shoals; be told of it in epic tales as sailors boast of their victories, and if you stay you might overhear whispers of awe and dread of the rage and might of what dwells within pelagic storms, those spirits who never returned from the sea, and the unfathomable might of leviathans known only to the cachalot and those rare few glimpsing a shadow in the depths.
If you travel through the country you can find it, temples of corrugated metal and bricks; archaic machines held together with welds, duct tape and dimly glowing runes; laughing farmhands heaving clods of soil from the earth to lob at eachother; faerie rocks jeering from the centre of a plowed field; forgotten gods standing motionless amongst the wheat; long abandoned churches that never fall into disrepair; half forgotten sigils carved into fence posts to ward off the Things in the night, and the eyes that yet still burn like red moons between the stalks of corn.
In the cities you can find it, in the prophecies etched and sprayed upon the subway walls by robed sages and masked youths; in the pig iron shrines to gods of the forge tucked in every nook and cranny of a foundry; in the clubs and bars that you can only find when you are shown them or when a full moon looms above; in the figures kneeled in the light of the street lamps and the shapes that lurk beyond their reach; in the graffiti that can race and dance or slowly shift upon the faces of buildings older than countries and refuse to be removed; in the timeworn temples that had the city built around them; in the druids of lawns and weeds; in the mages that carve their baseball bats with symbols of power and fill their trench coat pockets with glador brewed in basements and lifted from stores; in the bards that busk at the city crossroads and send ballads streaking across the globe in a crackle of sparks and binary; and in the warlocks both of new gods with bones of steel, veins of fire and skin a tough as concrete, and of the old gods that seep out like moss from the pavement as they refuse to be forgotten.
So as you go about your busy days, give a swift greeting to the magpies that watch and wait from the roofs and branches; pass a murmur of respect to the faerie oak that stands like an island in a sea of concrete; ignore the shapes glimpsed from the windows at night but draw the blinds and lock the doors. And always remember. That magic is not dead.
More Posts from Mollyhawk and Others
I for some reason my first though was that it was there in real life, you just couldn’t see it, and I’d much rather see Evil Murdercreature when I’m trying to run away
Perspective is pain
Good blog
Cheers!!
Pretty basic question but ah well- are the faeries aliens? Or seed world organisms that originated from earth?
The faeries, slaters and formids are all aliens, however the slaters are from an ancient seedworld/colony world of a now extinct alien.
Eight detonations toll like bells as the leviathan finally fell still. Behind it, the hulking mass of the vessel split like a maw, mechanical arms grasping desperately like pharyngeal jaws attempting to stuff the corpse down its gullet. Lifeless eyes that had seen the passing of near a century slip above the surface a final time as it is dragged into the metal cavern under the unseeing gaze of its kin.
As the soulless beast of steel snags upon the pier the mighty corpse is hauled from the gloom into air choked with smog and the roars of flame. Its fat feeds the furnaces, it’s flesh fuels the half starved skeletons that scamper beneath the showers of sparks and screaming metal, over watched by stone faced enforcers and bent to the whim of the monsters that lurk in dens gilded with gold far beyond the land scarred with soot they use to line their pockets.
To compare those lords of depravity to the dutiful guild of scavengers, to the ever inventive legions of parasites or the humble handiwork of plagues would be a disservice to these pillars of nature’s establishment. They are a cancer, a corrupting rot spawned from a broken system, a self perpetuating scourge that bloats and grows as it draws the life from all that surround it until the entire house of cards collapses under their weight. This is not survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps nor the mandate proclaimed by some long dead god. It is a death cult, an ouroboros swallowing itself until the bloated head chokes on the famined tail, a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction doomed to fall.
But when the ash and dust have settled, the countless cohorts of creeping things have worked their time honoured role, when the unrelenting tides of time have weathered steel and skeleton alike, these kleptocratic kings of ruin will lie forgotten, merely another scar among the countless upon the Earth, the graves upon which they had built their foundations finally finding closure beneath silt and soil as the chorus of life sings on without them.
-bit of a vent post to try and deal with whatever the deep fried fuck is happening to the world rn
You have built your dwellings upon the bones of those you damned, your cities upon the mass graves of countless beings, and your countries in the burnt and scarred remains of what was once their homes.
Every last breath, every lineage cut short, every forest, fen and fallow torn asunder feeds it; with every wisp of smoke, every incremental creep of a warming world, and with every drop falling from retreating glaciers it grows. A beast of fire and ice, choking ash and swelling seas, the roaring core of the earth surging forwards and the heartless cold of the endless reaches above plummeting down in its infernal halo.
This is not the gentle, loving death that carries souls softly into that good night, nor is it the wrath and rage of a mere god of war. It is the great equaliser, the callous harvestman scything wheat, wildflower and weed alike so that a new world may grow in its place. And when the slate is cleared, when the Earth’s lungs cough out the last of the soot and the ballard of life rises into a new chorus, you will be forgotten, the king of kings whose shattered ruins are razed by roots and rot, the mocking hand crushed beneath a universe it thought it could command, and its ruins buried not beneath that barren sands of a world that couldn’t live without it but the joyous songs of a planet unshackled from your iron grasp.
You like spec evo. I have decided that you are now a mutual. You are cool
Cheers!!
Absolutely speedran this one (how the hell are feathers less of a pain in the neck than a front-facing perspective?)
on endlings, and despair
Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?
If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.
We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.
We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.
Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.
In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.
It worked.
The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.
It worked.
Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.
It worked.
The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.
The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.
This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.
Nothing less.
One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.
For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.
Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.
Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.
It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.
One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.
If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.
All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.
We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.
-
paluboligo reblogged this · 4 months ago -
paluboligo liked this · 4 months ago
-
mollyhawk reblogged this · 4 months ago
