u/Mundane_Main_2726

Please don't leave comments like "I'm happy for you or sorry this happened". I've seen it happen, and it's pretty sad. You don't need to engage if you're not interested. Thank you.

TL,DR: The moon is on fire showed a mental condition as the reality of the story, and didn't treat it as a plot device, which is how it is represented in the majority of media.

Before getting into my yap, I want to say, yes, I know that the story relates to a different project by the author. I have not read that other story though, so I'm not going to express myself on that connection. Thus, I will be looking at the latest story for what it is on its own.

I would like to reflect on some reactions I saw, whether from the boys or a lot of people in the community, in regards as to how the story should have ended and what it should have been about.

I really loved this story. Part 1 to 3, all great and this was a wonderful concept and a really well executed portrayal of a bad episode of unmedicated psychosis.

It's a horrible thing how people's perception of schizophrenia has been informed by its awful portrayals in most media. This is reflected in a lot of people's complaint that the story should have ended with the protagonist ending up doing something atrocious, whether it's a political assassination or killing his parents. This is just depressing to me. People affected by conditions are not monsters and are often time not dangerous, if not to themselves.

Would it make for a "satisfying" ending? Why have a satisfying ending? In a story that is a very grounded portrayal of someone's delusions and how they spiral into this absurd conspiracy when not receiving the necessary care, there is no satisfying end. The horror of the story is the horror of a reality that is so foreign to most.

I think it's quite poetic how the story asserts its grounded identity by having this fantastical and absurd ending, ironically so far removed from the reader's perceived reality. The fact that the protagonist does not go on to commit any grand action is what makes it feel real. I think of part 3 as an epilogue to a story concluded in part 2. Part 3 doesn't need the reader to fully grasp it. It is functional, but not a literary progression. It was pretty depressing to see, but a very fascinating depiction of what this psychotic conspiratorial state looks for people.

Another point is how many people said the story should have been all set in a mental health facility, which just shows how people misunderstand how those work. In no way would the protagonist be allowed to get off meds in a facility. It shows the ignorance of how difficult it is to receive minimum care in a place like the US where healthcare is privatised. If the protagonist was able to receive the needed attention and help, there would be no Part 3.

Also, to have it said outright to you that the story was set in a clinic just cheapens it and is really boring. What's the point of having a story that requires no media literacy.

Literature doesn't always have a linear progression, as is the case in a lot of classics, and it should be something obvious to most readers.

I like to visualise the progression of parts 1 to 3 as the first two progressing as a line, a pretty straightforward setup for someone who's experiencing the early stages of psychosis. Part 2 concludes this narrative by establishing a point of no return, and part 3 is just an overinflated balloon that never bursts, that, again, is an expression of a mental state, not a description of reality as it would be perceived by neurotypical people, but a reality as experienced by the affected person.

The breeze carried the flaring sun through the ferns and grasses. There was a drone of flies around the muddy shores and the sand hissed as the young stepped on it. Then the sky caught on fire.

It burnt away, and winter came, and she forgot it could ever leave. The sun never rose, the candid blue it always lit became a desert of spores and thin black sand, and she forgot what it looked like when the day ended behind a treeline. She forgot about the moon too, and all she knew was the night.

Orange ghosts still flickered on the horizon sometimes, and there she knew to turn the other way, into the outer dark, where it stung to breathe. She forgot the bubbling flow of creeks and rivers, trickling between the rocks, but she remembered thirst.

She rose her head towards the sky and let the cold flakes melt on her face. Each droplet carried a thread of dust as it collided with others into a web, before dropping down into the muck.

She watched, following their fall, and stared into the soil. The night was quiet, the wind got lost again. She listened to the ice, melting and weeping, and leaned in closer, towards the small forming puddle, so small she probably did not even see it. She opened her jaws and scooped up the grey sludge, and the last dangling strand of her unborn's shell unstuck itself from between her teeth. The mud took it, so it could never be seen again, long after it had already been forgotten about.

She pushed the sludge down the scars in her throat, and it sunk thickly. Her mouth tasted of old smoke on its own, but the slop was warm and spoiled. Nameless chunks of decay brushed on her gums and stuck to the roof, tickling, while past her mouth, the mixture suddenly felt dense and dry as sand. She pushed it hard, jerking her head, until she felt it all in her gut. It was enough to fill her until she hurled.

She had not learnt again.

She marched, maybe forward or in a circle, maybe somewhere she went before. The black pillars stood around her the same wherever she was.

Then a splash echoed in the fog and her weight fell to the mud. She whined a deep hum in her chest, and crawled on her side, her legs yanking against the air, splattering around. The greaselike smoke wormed into her mouth, and it made her hiss and exhale. Like that, more of it spat onto her tongue and roof, and some of it tasted like curds of fermenting sweetness. Her chest gargled another whine, rising in pitch as it bellowed in solitude.

When she pulled herself on her trembling feet, she marched on with a limp. The mysterious growth deep in her femur bulged with each step, piercing further and further out of her flesh, or so she felt. It had been there since before the day the sky caught on fire, but she did not remember.

Eventually she was heading downhill. The fading tracks of one of her kin led her there, though she did not know how long she'd been following them, nor did she know why she was. The cold was stinging her eyes now, a whistling ghost creeping from beyond the ridge and rushing between the black pillars.

Her feeble eyes looked for the hiding landscape, and a heavy rattle sang from her chest, sending a frail shiver through the air. Only the wind howled back in a foreign echo.

She still limped forward, down to where the pillars laid scattered and ripped out of the soil, forced together into piles upon piles of rubble.

Where once a tremendous landslide roared towards the valley, she found shelter. The debris it carried now hung like a cave, water dripping from the charred roots onto massive stripped bones. Monstrous ribs clawed out of the mountain's new wall, where the skull laid buried along most of the twisted neck, while a giant foot was reaching out to drown in the weight of the air.

She was dwarfed by the carcass. The shreds of flesh that somehow had not decomposed yet were enough to fill her for seasons. The black fibres of muscle and skin had slid to the ground like heavy spiderwebs, and were it not for the sickly grey that the meat soaked in, it would have turned hard as stone and unfit for a meal.

Her nostrils had become immune to every smell, and she was hungry.

She did not have to pull hard for the meat to fall off. It was damp and mushy, hardly any different from the ooze she walked on and drank. Some of the tougher strings got stuck in the gaps between her teeth, while several teeth she lost right there. She failed to notice their fall and swallowed them, and others disappeared in the mass of flesh in front of her, leaving her gums, and returning to the mouth with a foul crunch.

She couldn't have any more, but she wasn't full. Her stomach melted and crawled up her throat, where it lodged itself at the back of her tongue. It was wide, too wide to sit in her belly, let alone her neck. Her belly, however, was taken up already, by thick intestines that kept on growing into strangling lumps that swam up and down and out into her stomach, where a liquid sat, sour like the air she gasped for.

She squirmed and spun around, but her stomach would not crawl out. It was stuck there until the day it burst. The night delivered her calls across the solitude, but could not offer anything but absent caresses, and more of the black powder that it stuffed down in her lungs.

She rolled up on the ground, where the snaking tail of the buried giant engulfed her, like her mother's did when she was young. She did not remember her mother, but she remembered her call.

A low deep wail shook her in her sleep. It rolled through the evernight, rising and rising as if it were to grow into a mountain. She opened her eyes to the darkness around her, and the long wail fell and boomed into a drum, a guttural thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. Then the night went quiet again.

She hissed and rose, the growth cutting through her swollen leg. A faint croak resounded in her chest, then she bellowed a low song, and the night went quiet again.

She looked dully at the fog in front of her, then headed that way.

The land was flat and unknowably wide, but its fumes made it a deceitful cavern, without a way in or out, inhabited by the vague ghosts of memories burnt onto its walls. She was nearing the edges of where everything laid thorned by the black pillars, as they grew thinner among stones and rocks that rumbled as she kicked them with her stride through the muck.

The urge to drink haunted her again. She bowed down with her jaws tilted open and the liquid poured into her mouth. She hoarked and hissed as soon as it sat on her tongue, then shook her jaws, so as to rid her body of every viscous drop of whatever it was she tried to swallow. It tasted like thirst. It was strong and overwhelming.

Even once the only grey pus in her mouth was the one oozing from her tumid gums, it still felt like a mouthful she could not swallow or let out.

She hurried a few steps further, and drank there, and the same disease rinsed her mouth. It still carried the melted viscera and coal she always downed, but whatever now stung the tears in her gums was new.

Too much of it crept down her throat. She bobbed her head once, then twice and spread open her jaws, and a flood the size of her bowels crawled up. Her legs fumbled forward as she gagged, until a thin brown stream oozed, running in sticky chunks down her neck. Rancid clots soured her mouth, and her throat sat bulging, itching as if filled with splintered deadwood.

She took two feeble steps forward, and they echoed in the distance behind her.

As if before she even heard the sound, she burst into a run, and the echo ran too.

Her legs sprinted into the unknown, but the mud buried her feet, pulling her towards the steps behind. The same began to do all the ills inside her. Just like when they suddenly left, now they shredded her leg, wretched her guts and spun her head.

The false echo sounded somewhere to her side now, so she turned the other way and ran there.

The ground was barely in front of her. Few dusted boulders and branches like charred lightning flashed in the great swarm of sporelike ghosts.

When the echo ran closer, its steps felt heavier than hers, shivering the ground, storming her viscera and bones. Yet all she could hear was how they sliced through the mud. The echo bellowed no sound.

Stones hiding under the putrid desert gave way to her weight, sliding and rolling, but she refused to fall. Spits of mud splattered her tail, and whether marks of her efforts or harbingers of defeat, she did not know.

She sank into a sudden pool. Everything thundered and it deafened her, and slow bubbles tickled and popped as they swarmed her. Then she pushed her weight up, before realising what stood over the surface.

She emerged further from where she slipped. The mud kept pushing her eyelids down and spraying from her nostrils, and for a while it drowned her still. When it finally let go, she could not see an opposite shore.

The stalker made no sound while it stood there. The soot in the air was too thick for her to see, but she could sense its mass looming over the pool, and so she stared back at the lurking dark.

Then it breathed, and she felt the blow against her wet face. She treaded the gross water with guarded movements, and the ground swam further and further down with every attempt at finding it, while unknowable things brushed and moved up her legs. Her foot kicked at some large form, an impossible shape that was gone when she tried to touch it again. The swamp was bottomless, and it held her, letting her float ignorant of its shadows.

Then ripples sent through her body as a great mass walked away into the night. She waited, sparing her breath, silent. Only when all stood the same around her, she turned away and paddled until her muzzle hit solid dirt, and her feet scraped at stones and pebbles that rolled to the abyss.

Black strains of the earth's bile trickled down from her back as she went on, searching for the horizon.

The white wind howled at the turbid air, and its soft crystals were grey when they came to sting her legs. Her thigh, pregnant with a gorging growth, had swollen to twice its size, and it stepped and dragged in an alternating pattern.

Then a great stone wall stood in her way. She circled it and found a crevice in its side, leading into the rock. It was narrow, but she fit once it grated off the skin on her spine. It widened towards the end, where a thin crack at the bottom of the wall exposed the way to a dark place further down. Its breath was chilling, and when it whistled, the distant roar of a terrible river carried with it. She could not pay it any mind. Sitting there, crammed and sheltered, her eyes closed and seasons went by in a slumber. Though maybe it was just a lazy blink.

The airflow inside the cave stopped.

She rose up and shuddered while the damp waft from the fissure cried alone. Her curious eyes, stuck in gunk, reached into the dark way out where the wind sounded distant, and her careful steps led the cave's cacophony of little clacking echoes. Then she came to a halt, and stared at the great shape in the entrance.

It was larger than her and could not pass. It did not try to, nor did it try to hide. It stood, alien and perverted, motionless like stone. Its small eyes were locked, gleaming and all-knowing. It was of her kin, an abominable ghost of what it once was: its starved skin clung greedily to the bones, and thick ash replaced the scales that it had melted away. She did not know she looked no different.

Its jaws tilted open slowly, and puffs of steam gushed from the narrow gap, they alone enough to make her seem small. She stared back into its eyes, and dared not move.

Then a low hiss filled the cave, and began to engulf them. The sound was heavy and made her ribs tighten, and she saw its chest swell and throb.

The hiss broke, and chopped into rising waves, then rattled a chain of grave croaks, each yowling louder than the last. They rose and fell and rose again, then its chest began to bark, pounding with an ill violence. Still, its eyes were possessively locked on her, and it never flinched, not until she snapped.

She came at it, then pulled back and snapped again when it crept its head too far into the cave. She bit on its lower jaw and pressed hard, their teeth scraping against each other. Then her muzzle crackled and she felt her bones splinter under the weight of its teeth. Her blood wept down, circling her eyes, but she did not let go. She pulled and twisted, feeling all the hard and soft surfaces of its jaw.

It pulled away with all its size, out into the night. Strips of her shaved skin dangled down her face, blocking her view, but she had felt its taste now, and limped after her prey.

Uphill the ground was fine and soft, and dry. It danced in whirls around her legs, and hissed as she descended the dune.

She hardly heard the hum carried by the far horizon, when a pair of great jaws jumped her from the dark and bashed her to the ground. It tore at her skin, and pressed down her tail. She kicked hard and her claw cut deep along its ribs: their surface felt moist and smooth before she defiled it. It let go and hissed at her, and snapped again. She caught its jaw in her bite, and a vile pop sounded in the night.

Blood trickled in thick streams from its exposed joint. Its lower jaw hung down, swinging from side to side, and from it each shred of meat, tooth and bone swung with its own motion.

It limped and twitched, all except the eyes. It stepped towards her, then burst into a sprint. She turned, and as soon as she stepped, sickly yellow pus squirted from the dark tears in her thigh, pouring down all the way to her claws, and she could not outrun it.

It tanked her to the wet sand, where printed shapes of their clash were made into puddles by shallow black water. It could not bite her, but its teeth sawed her skin just the same with each desperate slam. She tried to kick it again, and the sharp form in her bone shattered, sending splinters up her bowels and down to her feet. She wailed and the sound curled the grey foam around them.

She pushed it with her other leg and tugged its pale mass down. Then her jaws trapped its neck and in one blow, its throat erupted in her mouth.

All went silent. She could finally hear the waves and the gliding sand on the shore. She pulled away from the body, and it sat, still as stone, red streams trickling down a mountain to dissolve in the washing waves. She could finally eat.

Her leg flexed to lift her weight, but she did not even get to collapse. All the pushing only dug a slot that the water immediately filled back with sand.

Her breath puffed against the wet ground. She crawled, twitching, towards the mass of fresh meat and opened her mouth. None went down, and only some warm blood poured along her empty gums.

She moved towards the arm that laid nearby, where sand coagulated the open flesh. She gripped it and swallowed, before knowing it was her own.

A moan sounded in her chest, but it stung to sing it, thus she hissed instead. Water washed up around her jaw, it was cold though she could not feel it. She crawled towards where it was deeper, and let it pour in her mouth. It tasted like thirst, but how could she have learnt.

A chill ran through the fibres of her body, making her feel small and brittle. Then she felt something pull at the fibres that hung outwards, and so she turned her eye, first at her abandoned meal.

Small things stood on it, a whole group of them. They cawed little songs and dug their beaks in the red oozing pockets of the corpse. They were strange and familiar, but she had forgotten about them too long ago.

Her eye turned towards her back now, where she felt her meat pull and snap. They stood on her too, trotting back and forth. Their tails were soft even when caressing her shredded flesh, like the ferns and tall grasses of the singing summers she did not remember living.

She looked at them as they slowly turned pale and hazy. Then their light spread to the foam of rippling water. The water shone too, silver, then white and blinding. She tried to turn to where the horizon laid, but her head was too heavy, and it began to sink into the ground, then fall through the air, and the air grew bright too.

The sun was rising once more, maybe it would set the sky on fire again. Maybe the night was coming to and end, now that she could not stay awake. Maybe it was growing too bright, as she could not see a thing. Maybe she did not remember how bright everything could be. Or maybe it would stay dark for a little longer, now that it was time to sleep. She did not know, but now she could forget about it all.

____________________________

For my C., who took me to meet the plants and critters whose home was and is everywhere.

Winter would have been a memory now. The cold sky would have given way to the flaring breeze of the sun, waving with the ferns and grass. The copper sand would hiss under the steps of the young, and the mud would steam the drone of flies.

But the clouds were frozen and the earth scorched, and it was all she knew since the stars came to meet her earth. The sun never woke in the rose sky anymore, ashes and soot were all was left of the candid blue, and there was no day for to end in a red glow over the treelines. She forgot about the moon and all she knew was the night.

Orange ghosts still flickered on the horizon sometimes, and there she knew to turn the other way, into the outer dark of pungent air.

She forgot the bubbling flow of creeks and rivers, trickling between the rocks, but she remembered thirst.

She rose her head towards the sky and let the cold flakes melt on her face. Each droplet carried a thread of dust as it collided with others into a web, before dropping down into the muck.

She watched, following their fall, and stared into the soil. The night was quiet, the wind got lost again. She listened to the ice, melting and weeping, and leaned in closer, towards the small forming puddle, so small she probably did not even see it. She opened her jaws and scooped up the grey sludge, and the last dangling strand of her unborn's shell unstuck itself from between her teeth. The mud took it, so it could never be seen again, long after it had already been forgotten about.

She pushed the sludge down the scars in her throat, and it sunk thickly. Her mouth tasted of old smoke on its own, but the slop was warm and spoiled. Nameless chunks of decay brushed on her gums and stuck to the roof, tickling, while past her mouth, the mixture suddenly felt dense and dry as sand. She pushed it hard, jerking her head, until she felt it all in her gut. It was enough to fill her until she hurled.

She had not learnt again.

She marched, maybe forward or in a circle, maybe somewhere she went before. The black pillars stood around her the same wherever she was.

Then a splash echoed in the fog and her weight fell to the mud. She whined a deep hum in her chest, and crawled on her side, her legs yanking against the air, splattering around. The greaselike smoke wormed into her mouth, and it made her hiss and exhale. Like that, more of it spat onto her tongue and roof, and some of it tasted like curds of fermenting sweetness. Her chest gargled another whine, rising in pitch as it bellowed in solitude.

When she pulled herself on her trembling feet, she marched on with a limp. The mysterious growth deep in her femur bulged with each step, piercing further and further out of her flesh, or so she felt. It had been there since before the day the sky caught on fire, but she did not remember.

Eventually she was heading downhill. The fading tracks of one of her kin led her there, though she did not know how long she'd been following them, nor did she know why she was. The cold was stinging her eyes now, a whistling ghost creeping from beyond the ridge and rushing between the black pillars.

Her feeble eyes looked for the hiding landscape, and a heavy rattle sang from her chest, sending a frail shiver through the air. Only the wind howled back in a foreign echo.

She still limped forward, down to where the pillars laid scattered and ripped out of the soil, forced together into piles upon piles of rubble.

Where once a tremendous landslide roared towards the valley, she found shelter. The debris it carried now hung like a cave, water dripping from the charred roots onto massive stripped bones. Monstrous ribs clawed out of the mountain's new wall, where the skull laid buried along most of the twisted neck, while a giant foot was reaching out to drown in the weight of the air.

She was dwarfed by the carcass. The shreds of flesh that somehow had not decomposed yet were enough to fill her for seasons. The black fibres of muscle and skin had slid to the ground like heavy spiderwebs, and were it not for the sickly grey that the meat soaked in, it would have turned hard as stone and unfit for a meal.

Her nostrils had become immune to every smell, and she was hungry.

She did not have to pull hard for the meat to fall off. It was damp and mushy, hardly any different from the ooze she walked on and drank. Some of the tougher strings got stuck in the gaps between her teeth, while several teeth she lost right there. She failed to notice their fall and swallowed them, and others disappeared in the mass of flesh in front of her, leaving her gums, and returning to the mouth with a foul crunch.

She couldn't have any more, but she wasn't full. Her stomach melted and crawled up her throat, where it lodged itself at the back of her tongue. It was wide, too wide to sit in her belly, let alone her neck. Her belly, however, was taken up already, by thick intestines that kept on growing into strangling lumps that swam up and down and out into her stomach, where a liquid sat, sour like the air she gasped for.

She squirmed and spun around, but her stomach would not crawl out. It was stuck there until the day it burst. The night delivered her calls across the solitude, but could not offer anything but absent caresses, and more of the black powder that it stuffed down in her lungs.

She rolled up on the ground, where the snaking tail of the buried giant engulfed her, like her mother's did when she was young. She did not remember her mother, but she remembered her call.

A low deep wail shook her in her sleep. It rolled through the evernight, rising and rising as if it were to grow into a mountain. She opened her eyes to the darkness around her, and the long wail fell and boomed into a drum, a guttural thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. Then the night went quiet again.

She hissed and rose, the growth cutting through her swollen leg. A faint croak resounded in her chest, then she bellowed a low song, and the night went quiet again.

She looked dully at the fog in front of her, then headed that way.

The land was flat and unknowably wide, but its fumes made it a deceitful cavern, without a way in or out, inhabited by the vague ghosts of memories burnt onto its walls. She was nearing the edges of where everything laid thorned by the black pillars, as they grew thinner among stones and rocks that rumbled as she kicked them with her stride through the muck.

The urge to drink haunted her again. She bowed down with her jaws tilted open and the liquid poured into her mouth. She hoarked and hissed as soon as it sat on her tongue, then shook her jaws, so as to rid her body of every viscous drop of whatever it was she tried to swallow. It tasted like thirst. It was strong and overwhelming.

Even once the only grey pus in her mouth was the one oozing from her tumid gums, it still felt like a mouthful she could not swallow or let out.

She hurried a few steps further, and drank there, and the same disease rinsed her mouth. It still carried the melted viscera and coal she always downed, but whatever now stung the tears in her gums was new.

Too much of it crept down her throat. She bobbed her head once, then twice and spread open her jaws, and a flood the size of her bowels crawled up. Her legs fumbled forward as she gagged, until a thin brown stream oozed, running in sticky chunks down her neck. Rancid clots soured her mouth, and her throat sat bulging, itching as if filled with splintered deadwood.

She took two feeble steps forward, and they echoed in the distance behind her.

As if before she even heard the sound, she burst into a run, and the echo ran too.

Her legs sprinted into the unknown, but the mud buried her feet, pulling her towards the steps behind. The same began to do all the ills inside her. Just like when they suddenly left, now they shredded her leg, wretched her guts and spun her head.

The false echo sounded somewhere to her side now, so she turned the other way and ran there.

The ground was barely in front of her. Few dusted boulders and branches like charred lightning flashed in the great swarm of sporelike ghosts.

When the echo ran closer, its steps felt heavier than hers, shivering the ground, storming her viscera and bones. Yet all she could hear was how they sliced through the mud. The echo bellowed no sound.

Stones hiding under the putrid desert gave way to her weight, sliding and rolling, but she refused to fall. Spits of mud splattered her tail, and whether marks of her efforts or harbingers of defeat, she did not know.

She sank into a sudden pool. Everything thundered and it deafened her, and slow bubbles tickled and popped as they swarmed her. Then she pushed her weight up, before realising what stood over the surface.

She emerged further from where she slipped. The mud kept pushing her eyelids down and spraying from her nostrils, and for a while it drowned her still. When it finally let go, she could not see an opposite shore.

The stalker made no sound while it stood there. The soot in the air was too thick for her to see, but she could sense its mass looming over the pool, and so she stared back at the lurking dark.

Then it breathed, and she felt the blow against her wet face. She treaded the gross water with guarded movements, and the ground swam further and further down with every attempt at finding it, while unknowable things brushed and moved up her legs. Her foot kicked at some large form, an impossible shape that was gone when she tried to touch it again. The swamp was bottomless, and it held her, letting her float ignorant of its shadows.

Then ripples sent through her body as a great mass walked away into the night. She waited, sparing her breath, silent. Only when all stood the same around her, she turned away and paddled until her muzzle hit solid dirt, and her feet scraped at stones and pebbles that rolled to the abyss.

Black strains of the earth's bile trickled down from her back as she went on, searching for the horizon.

The white wind howled at the turbid air, and its soft crystals were grey when they came to sting her legs. Her thigh, pregnant with a gorging growth, had swollen to twice its size, and it stepped and dragged in an alternating pattern.

Then a great stone wall stood in her way. She circled it and found a crevice in its side, leading into the rock. It was narrow, but she fit once it grated off the skin on her spine. It widened towards the end, where a thin crack at the bottom of the wall exposed the way to a dark place further down. Its breath was chilling, and when it whistled, the distant roar of a terrible river carried with it. She could not pay it any mind. Sitting there, crammed and sheltered, her eyes closed and seasons went by in a slumber. Though maybe it was just a lazy blink.

The airflow inside the cave stopped.

She rose up and shuddered while the damp waft from the fissure cried alone. Her curious eyes, stuck in gunk, reached into the dark way out where the wind sounded distant, and her careful steps led the cave's cacophony of little clacking echoes. Then she came to a halt, and stared at the great shape in the entrance.

It was larger than her and could not pass. It did not try to, nor did it try to hide. It stood, alien and perverted, motionless like stone. Its small eyes were locked, gleaming and all-knowing. It was of her kin, an abominable ghost of what it once was: its starved skin clung greedily to the bones, and thick ash replaced the scales that it had melted away. She did not know she looked no different.

Its jaws tilted open slowly, and puffs of steam gushed from the narrow gap, they alone enough to make her seem small. She stared back into its eyes, and dared not move.

Then a low hiss filled the cave, and began to engulf them. The sound was heavy and made her ribs tighten, and she saw its chest swell and throb.

The hiss broke, and chopped into rising waves, then rattled a chain of grave croaks, each yowling louder than the last. They rose and fell and rose again, then its chest began to bark, pounding with an ill violence. Still, its eyes were possessively locked on her, and it never flinched, not until she snapped.

She came at it, then pulled back and snapped again when it crept its head too far into the cave. She bit on its lower jaw and pressed hard, their teeth scraping against each other. Then her muzzle crackled and she felt her bones splinter under the weight of its teeth. Her blood wept down, circling her eyes, but she did not let go. She pulled and twisted, feeling all the hard and soft surfaces of its jaw.

It pulled away with all its size, out into the night. Strips of her shaved skin dangled down her face, blocking her view, but she had felt its taste now, and limped after her prey.

Uphill the ground was fine and soft, and dry. It danced in whirls around her legs, and hissed as she descended the dune.

She hardly heard the hum carried by the far horizon, when a pair of great jaws jumped her from the dark and bashed her to the ground. It tore at her skin, and pressed down her tail. She kicked hard and her claw cut deep along its ribs: their surface felt moist and smooth before she defiled it. It let go and hissed at her, and snapped again. She caught its jaw in her bite, and a vile pop sounded in the night.

Blood trickled in thick streams from its exposed joint. Its lower jaw hung down, swinging from side to side, and from it each shred of meat, tooth and bone swung with its own motion.

It limped and twitched, all except the eyes. It stepped towards her, then burst into a sprint. She turned, and as soon as she stepped, sickly yellow pus squirted from the dark tears in her thigh, pouring down all the way to her claws, and she could not outrun it.

It tanked her to the wet sand, where printed shapes of their clash were made into puddles by shallow black water. It could not bite her, but its teeth sawed her skin just the same with each desperate slam. She tried to kick it again, and the sharp form in her bone shattered, sending splinters up her bowels and down to her feet. She wailed and the sound curled the grey foam around them.

She pushed it with her other leg and tugged its pale mass down. Then her jaws trapped its neck and in one blow, its throat erupted in her mouth.

All went silent. She could finally hear the waves and the gliding sand on the shore. She pulled away from the body, and it sat, still as stone, red streams trickling down a mountain to dissolve in the washing waves. She could finally eat.

Her leg flexed to lift her weight, but she did not even get to collapse. All the pushing only dug a slot that the water immediately filled back with sand.

Her breath puffed against the wet ground. She crawled, twitching, towards the mass of fresh meat and opened her mouth. None went down, and only some warm blood poured along her empty gums.

She moved towards the arm that laid nearby, where sand coagulated the open flesh. She gripped it and swallowed, before knowing it was her own.

A moan sounded in her chest, but it stung to sing it, thus she hissed instead. Water washed up around her jaw, it was cold though she could not feel it. She crawled towards where it was deeper, and let it pour in her mouth. It tasted like thirst, but how could she have learnt.

A chill ran through the fibres of her body, making her feel small and brittle. Then she felt something pull at the fibres that hung outwards, and so she turned her eye, first at her abandoned meal.

Small things stood on it, a whole group of them. They cawed little songs and dug their beaks in the red oozing pockets of the corpse. They were strange and familiar, but she had forgotten about them too long ago.

Her eye turned towards her back now, where she felt her meat pull and snap. They stood on her too, trotting back and forth. Their tails were soft even when caressing her shredded flesh, like the ferns and tall grasses of the singing summers she did not remember living.

She looked at them as they slowly turned pale and hazy. Then their light spread to the foam of rippling water. The water shone too, silver, then white and blinding. She tried to turn to where the horizon laid, but her head was too heavy, and it began to sink into the ground, then fall through the air, and the air grew bright too.

The sun was rising once more, maybe it would set the sky on fire again. Maybe the night was coming to and end, now that she could not stay awake. Maybe it was growing too bright, as she could not see a thing. Maybe she did not remember how bright everything could be. Or maybe it would stay dark for a little longer, now that it was time to sleep. She did not know, but now she could forget about it all.

__________________________

For my C., who took me to meet the plants and critters whose home was and is everywhere.

I'm looking for some calorie-rich breakfast recipes, trying to gain some weight.

Definitely aiming for something with plantain, or that goes well with some plantain, steamed or fried. I'd avoid meat and fish or seabugs, since it's a little too expensive for my budget, and I prefer to save that for dinner.

Ideally something that I could make one day and reheat over the next few mornings.

I usually have some grits and eggs when it's colder, but as of recent I'm just going for bread with honey and it's not all that nutritious, though certainly good.

Or something along those lines.

Tl,dr looking for resources about nazi/fascist symbols/tattoos to identify a potential nazi.

When I was a kid, my parents hung out with some shady people. I grew up in the countryside, lots of conservative people around here. For context, this is in Europe.

We knew, for example, two brothers who used to be mercs, though I don't know much about them now, don't even remember their names for that matter. One of them had a ranch in the area though.

This one guy, dead for a few years now, who at the time was in his 50s/60s was also a merc, which is what I was told, and was asked not to ask him about it. I was an inquisitive kid so I did anyway, and he told me he was an engineer. He had travelled the world quite a lot, knew a lot of foreign cuisines and had lots of bullshit stories to tell us about his travels.

Despite this, he was a raging bigot and a terrible person (especially racist), and realising this was a pretty shocking part of maturing, realising how my parents just let me hang out around this guy.

The merc story though, comes from an anecdote about him, where someone recognised and confronted him about a tattoo he had. Guy had a bunch of tattoos on his arms, old ones and blown out.

My suspicion is that, while maybe he was an engineer, it's very likely he was part of a nazi group, which had nazi symbols tattooed.

I did some digging and found a couple of pictures where a few tattoos are visible. One of them is a ram/ram's skull (can't tell, the picture is not very clear). The other seems to be a cougar, maybe wolf's head, stylised. My guess is that he had these ones for aesthetics, since they were pretty on display. But I do remember him having others.

Today a vague memory hit me, and I remembered that he MIGHT have had a totenkopf tattoo on his chest/abdomen. I am not entirely sure, and none of the pictures I have show it. On one picture he does have a black bandana with a skull and bones, which is certainly telling, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it's just a "cool pirate bandana" (i don't necessarily believe so, but I'm willing to set this aside for the moment).

So, totenkopf or not, I'd like to be able to compare the tattoos that I'm seeing to those used by nazi and fascist groups, even niche stuff. My guess would be that he's had these since the 80s the earliest.

Thank you everyone who wants to help and had the patience to read my post.

I do know that gonochorism evolved separately multiple times among other lifeforms, like plants (where, what we understand as "female" and "male", are the same in name, and similar in function, but not origin), however, I am curious as to whether it evolved separately among animals, or whether it is an ancestral trait.

I know hermaphroditism in its various configurations is analogous, as evident among vertebrates, where gonochorism, as far as I know, is ancestral and inherited from the last common ancestor of Vertebrata.

I could expand this question further, by asking whether gametes are analogous or homologous to begin with. After all, monoecious species can self-fertilise with sperm and eggs, though there are other forms of monoecious reproduction (say fragmentation).

Horror or not. I don't mean fear of the future, fear of what people are capable of. I mean fear that made you question your safety in your most familiar surroundings. Essentially the feeling of watching an effective horror movie, in simple terms.

Looking for book recommendations. Something unsettling, but not necessarily horror. Something slow paced, interesting characters and environments. I really love minimalist poetry and rich writing (artistically rich), while very flowery prose tends to take me out of immersion, like gothic literature (though I do love Frankenstein).

I love modern and post modern literature, so those are welcome in particular.

For reference, if it is of any help, among my favourite authors are McCarthy, Steinbeck, Woolf.

Some books I love are Grapes of Wrath, House of Leaves, I'm Not Scared (by N. Ammaniti), Call of the Wild and To The Lighthouse.

Any setting is welcome, whether it's set in space, a city, ocean, mountains etc.

"Haus" and "maison" are blue in the book, yet casa, which is both spanish and italian for house, are not. I initially wondered if it's a matter of etymology, but that's not the case. "Maison" is related to the english word "mansion", both deriving from latin "mansionem", meaning adobe/house. "House" and "haus" are both germanic words unrelated to latin. "Casa" is obviously a latin-derived word of mixed origin, potentially deriving from an archaic word for "shelter".

MZD seems to know some italian, certainly enough to realise what "casa" means, so there's no way this is a mistake. If it is, it would be rather silly.

Any ideas or info on this?

With how much goon likes The House of Leaves, and brings it up, I'm surprised we haven't had a video on it yet.

I'd love for him to analyse it thoroughly, there's so much to talk about, especially since people usually limit themselves to the Navidson Record and the house itself, while Johnny and Zampanò deserve the same amount of appreciation and interest. There's so much to say about this book, and I feel like goon would be the perfect person to cover it.

With the Backrooms film coming out, it seems like the perfect time to make a video on the house.

Is there something wrong on my end? While the "All" section is alright, the Image section is pretty poor in relevant results.

I don't really have any filters on. I tried to set my Safe Search off, to see if it would improve it, but no, it's the same.

Making some today, from scratch. Should i freeze it? Store it in a jar? How long will it be good for? I'm assuming I'll end up with more than I need for one dish so