The Clockwork Elves

 Source material for Lithic.

Gone to Sleep

Moby and Kelli Scarr make a song based on this picture by artist Phil Toledano.


The video about their creation process (and the song itself) gives a great vibe of eerie desolation.




Author's note: the first night I watched this it inspired a fascinating nightmare about Changeling: the Lost's "Gentry", so I'm considering it prime fodder for that game at least.

Decemberists Poster 2

The great Forrest Whale chimera.

Art by Daniel Danger.

Mythic Miami

From the Miami New Times:

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack -- a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. "Demons found doors to our world," adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons' gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with "black windows." The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. "If you wake at night and see her," a ten-year-old says softly, "her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing."

The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name," says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. "I've seen her," he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

Full story here.

Less pretty, but also available at Archive.org.

The Shadows of St. Petersburg

The hungry ghosts crowd in great overlapping mobs, swarming unseen through the places they haunted in life. They search wearily and in vain for something, anything to give their prolongation meaning, to feed the emptiness inside.


Of Alexey Titarenko:

Major photo series include "City of Shadows" (1992-1994), "Black and White Magic of St. Petersburg" (1995-1997), and "Time Standing Still" (1998-1999). In those series Titarenko paints a bitter picture of a Russia (seen through the lens of St. Petersburg), where people live in a world of unrealized hopes and where time seems to have stopped.

More here.

Nature's Wrath

A spirit of wilderness and desolation lashes out with impotent rage at the highway desecrating it's land.

Or, alternately: The last remaining eddy of excess energy released by a powerful ritual in the area.


Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath, by way of Boing Boing.

The Protean Swarm

It's movement unnatural as it slid across the sky, growing, contracting, throwing out amorphous limbs of animate specks. But it seemed to us that what we saw was only the smallest extremity of a thing whose bulk remained housed in some strange sub-dimensions.

Video.