The Lurking Fog
A Pink Necromancer Fiction Short
LGBTQAI+ FICTION | The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane | TransMan MC

The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane - A Pink Necromancer Short Fiction Story 

Series Trigger Warnings:

 * Polyamorous married gay couple and their live-in lover

 * Intersex main character, who lives as a trans man

 * Furry Yaoi 

 * Characters often drink, swear, use drugs, and smoke hookahs.

 * Transman Mpreg

Not all things appear in all stories. 

Series Heat Level:

 * Short Stories: Sweet, Fluffy, Lime, or Limon

 * Novellas: Lime, Limon, Orange

 * Novels: Orange, Lemon

What is the series about?

It's three god-level, planet destroying, alien invader Space Elf, Space Faerie, Space Demon megalomaniac super villain bumbling wizards, and their ship's crew (The UnSeelie Court) with big global domination plans, whom have invaded 40th century Earth, settled in a lighthouse in Maine, started a zombie apocalypse, are hellbent on destroying all Humans and taking over the planet, but are never getting anything done because they are too busy throwing temper tantrums, having hissy fits, and flinging food, sea slugs, insults, and sexual tension at each other, to ever get around to destroying the planet.

It's slice-of-life survival horror in a post-apocalyptic necromantic dictatorship, told through dysfunctional domestic intimacy between soul-stealing villains who rule the world. Welcome to the spiralling madness of Quaraun’s eldritch, sensory-heavy, character-driven, neurotic, dysfunctional, intimate, sugar-dusted Fae-punk world. This is the hostile, dystopian, necromantic, and hyper-sensory domestic horror of Quaraun’s everyday life with BoomFuzzy (and sometimes GhoulSpawn), in a grim world ruled by undead Faerie warlords where society has collapsed and survival is brutal, intimate, and corrupt, and Humans are often on the menu of UnSeelie Court feasts.

Seen in image: 

- IMAGE 1: The Pink Necromancer, Thullid Infested Moon Elf silk weaver, travelling merchant, & Royal Court Mage of The UnSeelie Court: Quaraun Swanzen on Noodle Beach. With his unhinged temper, his 12 foot long prehensile, venomous jellyfish tentacle hair, his deadly laser wand, and his inability to stay sober long enough to cast a spell properly, he is the most feared being in the known universe. Quaraun is literally a Space JellyFish (A Thullid) whom has taken control of the corpse of a dead Elf.

In the year 2525, a comet struck the Moon. Now, in 40th century Maine, Earth is frozen, the Moon is fractured, and UnDead Lobsters are a serious problem. And then there's Quaraun: The Pink Necromancer. Most feared super villain on Earth. Possibly the galaxy. Maybe ever. But all he wants is tea, silk embroidery, and a calm evening in his lighthouse.

- IMAGE 2: Master Chef Phooka turned Lich King of The UnSeelie Court: King Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn with his 1968 VW Bus Beach Noodle Food Truck. He is king of the entire fucking planet. Defy him and he'll serve you as the main course of the next UnSeelie Court feast. The world's only known Unicorn, in his true form he is a tiny lilac coloured Shetland Pony with a gleaming silver horn. In his Lich form he is a blue crystal skeleton of a Friesian stallion. 

BoomFuzzy, the Unicorn Lich King of the UnSeelie Court, is Quaraun's dead husband. Technically dead. Officially terrifying. Unofficially the best baker left in the apocalypse.

- IMAGE 3: The Satyr-like, mad scientist Sheep Demon: Gremorse Liore aka GhoulSpawn with his 1974 AMC Gremlin time machine. He is Quaraun's apprentice, and fast becoming the most powerful wizard in the universe.

GhoulSpawn, their brilliant, baffled companion, fell through time from 1978 and never found the way home. Now he juggles tech repairs, running from zombies, and being madly in love with the two most dangerous men of the apocalypse.

 - Art by Wendy Christine Allen. 

- Not seen here: Toobe: a deceptively innocent looking tiny flying silver metal orb that hoovers around GhoulSpawn, giving science reports and scanning for dangers, Toobe is a sadistically insane sentient AI from thirteen thousand years in the future, who is the real brains behind the plot of global domination.

• The Series Prologue  

• Faeries vs Elves (In The Quaraun Series) A Pink Necromancer World Lore Post

The Lurking Fog

The wind howled.

It was not just wind.

No. Not natural.

Quaraun knew the sound.

Wailing. A Banshee’s wailing. The fog was alive.

Thick. Pale silver. Heavy.

Crawling across his pink silks. Damp earth on his tongue. Cold mist clung like webbing. Bitter. Dry. Salted fish and black bread churned in his stomach. He hated black bread. He hated fish. He hated fog.

“Elf.”

Unicorn’s hand.

Dark.

Heavy.

Strong.

The scent of the Faerie King. Quaraun knew he was there without seeing him or hearing him.

Clove oil.

Gingerbread.

Absinthe. Quaraun’s thoughts spiralled.

Drunken. Obsessive.

He loved the Unicorn. It distracted him from the task at hand.

Unicorn was too close.

Too close.

Not close enough.

Never close enough.

He wanted. Needed. Hungered. For the Unicorn. Dead. The Faerie had died three centuries ago. No more flesh, the Faerie King was a ghost whom haunted him now.

Quaraun stood in the graveyard on the cliff. Listening. Watching. waiting. It was difficult to be a necromancer and seek out the dead, when the dead were in the habit of always following you around. The Lich King’s seductive touch filled his mind.

“Back off,” Quaraun snarled. “I need to hear the other ghosts. Not you.”

BoomFuzzy drifted back to GhoulSpawn’s side instead.

“The Elf hears it,” BoomFuzzy muttered to GhoulSpawn.

“I hear it,” GhoulSpawn whimpered. “What is it?”

“Ghosts.”

“Like you?”

“None are like me. I’s a Lich.”

A loud shriek echoed through the fog. GhoulSpawn covered his flip-floppy lamp ears.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The banshee cry,” BoomFuzzy replied. “The echo in the fog. A right fuckin’ funeral song.”

Quaraun’s eye twitched.

“Funeral,” the Pink Necromancer repeated. “Death. Cry. Crying echoes. Sorrow. Grief. The fog is sorrow. It mourns.”

“Ya always mournin’ something, JellyBrains.” BoomFuzzy drifted back to Quaraun and leaned close. Hot breath. Cold lips. Wet mouth pressed to Quaraun’s ear. “Mourn me. Mourn this. Mourn yer pearly arse sittin’ on me lap.”

Quaraun pushed the Lich away.

“Not now. Not now. I hear voices.”

“Ya always hearin’ voices, Love. Got yarself a JellyFish gnawing on ya brain.”

“Not those voices. Others.”

GhoulSpawn fidgeted at the graveyard gate. Cloven hooves on frozen stone.

Click. Clack. Click.

Nervous rhythm. Sheep’s wool smell. Wet fleece. His soft curls dripped with mist. He looked lost. He was always lost.

“Guys…” GhoulSpawn’s voice broke. “There’s… movement… like… not good… Between the graves. I saw… shadows.”

“Shadows walk when I call them,” Quaraun said.

“You didn’t call these.”

Quaraun did not like that answer. He clutched his cane tighter. Gold glove stiff. His fingers could not close. Twisted. Broken. Useless. But his wand… his Rainbow Wand lived in his hand like a serpent.

He raised it. Moonstone gleamed. Fog shimmered.

Something screamed.

The cry ripped through the mist.

Banshee.

Wailing.

Grief. Bitter grief. Sorrow thick enough to taste.

Quaraun shivered.

“I hate the sound. I hate it. It echoes in my head.”

“Cryin’ for yer soul, Love,” BoomFuzzy said. “It wants ya. Wants me. Wants the Goat. Ghosts always want me Goat.”

“I am not — ” GhoulSpawn’s voice cracked. “I’m a Sheep!”

“Ya a goat, Laddie. Goat math wizard. Crunch yer numbers. Count the bones.”

GhoulSpawn shifted uneasily. His eyes glowed gold. Equations flickered there. Math written in terror.

“Dude, I can’t count bones in the fog. I can’t count anything in this fog. I don’t even want to count bones! Why are we in a graveyard? I don’t want to be in a graveyard.”

“Silence!” Quaraun hissed. “I must think. I must concentrate.”

He could not think. The wailing shredded thought. His head swarmed. Hair writhed. Jellyfish tentacles coiling around his throat. His own hair choking him. He pulled at it. Snarled.

“Stop it!” He scolded his hair.

BoomFuzzy chuckled.

“Yer hair loves ya more than I do.”

“Nothing loves more than you do.”

“True, Love. I fuckin’ adore ya.” He pinched Quaraun’s arse.

“Stop that!” Quaraun shrieked. “The dead are watching.”

“So let ’em watch.”

The fog swelled.

Thick.

Pulsing.

Graveyard stones leaned closer. Not leaning. Moving. Sliding. Closing in.

GhoulSpawn whimpered.

“Uhm… Guys… the graves are… uhm… yeah. They’re moving.”

“They are always moving,” Quaraun muttered. “Graves move. Bones rattle. The fog hides. Fog eats. I hate fog.”

A shape lurked. Pale silver shimmer. Hollow face. Empty sockets. Long black hair dripping seaweed. Water running down its gown. Mouth wide.

Crying. Wailing.

The banshee.

Quaraun’s knees buckled. Pain shot up his bad leg. He stumbled. BoomFuzzy caught him. Tight. Strong. The Unicorn’s big fluffy purple tail wrapped his waist.

“Stand, JellyElf.”

“I can not. My leg. My damned leg!”

“Then I carry ya.”

“I will walk. I must walk.”

He forced his weight on the cane. Every step agony. Agony and silk. Silk dragging wet across stone. Rose petals clinging to his feet.

“Elf,” BoomFuzzy warned. “It comes closer.”

“Then kill it!”

“I fuckin’ love it when ya boss me ‘round. Do it again.”

“Will you stop seducing me and obliterate the damned banshee we came here to banish!”

BoomFuzzy leapt. Dark brown skin melting to lilac hide as the Faerie king transformed into his Unicorn form.

The Unicorn King.

Horn glimmering silver.

His hooves cracked the frozen soil.

He charged into the fog.

The banshee screamed louder. Crying echo in the mist. The sound split Quaraun’s skull. He dropped his cane. Clutched his head. Blood in his nose. Bitter. Dry. Cold.

GhoulSpawn crouched beside him.

“Dude! you’re like bleeding all over the place!”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“You okay?”

“I am never okay.”

“Dude, I can build — something. Like a… frequency disruptor. Cancel the wailing. Might stop the bleeding.”

“Do it then!”

“I don’t have the parts!”

“Then you are useless!”

GhoulSpawn’s long floppy ears flattened. He did not argue. He never argued. Not with Quaraun. Not when Quaraun’s eyes burned pink fire.

BoomFuzzy slammed into the banshee. They tangled. Horn through mist. Shadow blood sprayed. Cold wind scattered it like glass shards.

The banshee screamed one last time.

Sorrow broke.

Echo cracked.

Fog shivered.

Gone.

Silence.

Graveyard still again.

BoomFuzzy shifted back into his Humanoid form. Sweat and seaweed and clove oil. He wrapped his strong arms around Quaraun. Kissed his neck.

“See? Easy. All ya needed was me big horn rammed up her arse.”

Quaraun shoved him.

“You are crude.”

“Aye.”

“Crude and vulgar.”

“And ya love it.”

“Yes. But there is a time and a place and in case you hadn’t noticed I am fucking bleeding all over fucking shit! My silks are ruined!”

“Ah, so we should strip ya naked and toss ya in a bathtub, eh?”

“That is not what I said.”

“It what I heard.”

“You are impossible!”

GhoulSpawn sighed.

“So… uh. Dinner?”

“I am not hungry,” Quaraun muttered. His stomach growled. Bitter black bread taste still on his tongue.

“I am hungry,” BoomFuzzy said. “Always hungry. Horny too.”

“Shut up.”

GhoulSpawn rubbed his arm.

“Seriously though. I think it’s gone.”

Quaraun stared into the fog. Moonstone glimmer. Cold mist licking his silk.

“Nothing is ever gone.”

His eye twitched.

The fog stirred again.

Loot & Achievements

• Item Gained: Moonstone Shard dripping sorrow
• Item Gained: Wet Rose Petals (x13)
• Skill Unlocked: Pontificate About Fog (Rank II)
• Quest Complete: Drive Off Banshee with Horny Unicorn Husband
• Achievement: Yelled at Goat for Uselessness (Again)
• Achievement: Did Not Admit to Hunger Despite Growling Stomach
• Moral of the Story: Fog is never gone. Neither is BoomFuzzy’s horn.

The Lurking For - extended 2025 "Quaraun's Delirium" version

The salt-laced spit dripped down Quaraun’s pink silk slipper. Fucking disgusting. It was the same shade of putrid piss that stuck to the insides of his goddamn throat after one too many of BoomFuzzy’s ‘special’ fermented slugs. Not a fucking hue he associated with anything divine, or beautiful, or even remotely close to the way those ghastly anemic things in the graveyards clung to bone and rotted flesh should look.

Pink.

A vulgar splash of sickly pink like a diseased bruise on some already bruised world.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The sea clawed at the rocks a yard from his slipper-edge, hissing up scummy froth thick with something vaguely squidly. It was going to be one of those tides again. One where even BoomFuzzy’s greasy purple dreadlocks would reek like it hadn't been rinsed since that last time with the tide pool hermit crabs— and that had been… well, when had that been?

Three Tuesdays back?

Five? No.

Four Thursdays.

It was always four fucking Thursdays before a fucking full moon and one Wednesday after the fucking shitbirds got out of their nests to squawk about some dead squid’s lost eyeball stuck in a tidepool.

Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn.

The stench would linger for weeks in that oily sheen on everything, slick enough to catch those goddamn anemones BoomFuzzy insisted were “delicacies.”

Fuck delicacies.

They looked like the innards of something dying sideways and humming its own particular strain of bad luck back up through the kelp beds.

GhoulSpawn wheezed beside him, a ragged suck-in of air that sounded suspiciously like sucking brine through bone. He smelled of it already. The salt bleed through GhoulSpawn’s wool— sheep’s wool, of all the abominations – was worse than BoomFuzzy’s anemones even unopened. Like licking out an old shepherd’s beard after a fortnight in a rainproof tarpaulin dipped in mutton broth gone sour.

“You okay there, Sheep?” Quaraun rasped.

He hadn't moved his foot back from the clifftop scrape of granite scoured slick and damp like polished bone by that ceaseless gnawing tide.

Not moving.

Couldn’t risk it.

Couldn’t afford to.

One shift of weight— just one goddamn inch off-kilter, and that pink silk would slurp down past his ankles in something that might as well be bloodless pus.

GhoulSpawn blinked like a startled bat with too many eyes crammed into its maw. Not enough skull space left for the whole damn organ. The way he’d kept trying to cram everything else into it—the goddamn numbers, calculations scrawled on his palm-skin like some kind of cursed tallyman gone mad and bled out onto the back of his hand – just wasn't… right.

Not natural.

Never was with GhoulSpawn.

Numbers weren’t supposed to bleed like that. Wasn't meant to run slick under a chipped horn, smell faintly like overboiled cabbage and bad pennies left too long in a pocket stitched shut against a corpse's gut rot.

Didn't belong there.

Didn't belong anywhere.

"It—there's," GhoulSpawn choked out. His tongue snagged on the wool fringe dangling from that one jawbone, still loose enough to flap back and forth like a dead thing in some forgotten wind-scarred crypt. "The numbers…"

Numbers always made him itch. Like they were trying to claw their way through something skin-thin, a membrane stretched across his skull just thick enough to hold the goddamn things inside. The whole of GhoulSpawn felt taut as a strung gut—all angles and twitching bone points like that damned taxidermy spider back in the crypt-study off the scullery. Only this time they weren't numbers, not quite. Not neat ones with their fat black strokes crammed onto parchment thick enough to be boiled into a decent stew of something vaguely edible.

No, these were… echoes.

Whispering slivers of them that snagged like barnacles on teeth already numbed with dead things and the taste of rust and fishmeal brine. They tasted like bone-grinder dust kicked up from what hadn’t been churned yet, what was still waiting to be swallowed whole by whatever gnawed at those rocks down there—whatever scraped past them even now with its own kind of hungry sighing sound.

“The numbers," GhoulSpawn croaked again, voice scraping sideways like a fish skeleton dragged over barnacle-caked driftwood on the back tides. "They want to be… they..."

He swallowed.

That one was so goddamn loud it rattled loose a couple more bits of wool from where that damned jawbone hung slack enough you could poke at it with your fingernail and get a good three inches through before you hit anything solid.

"...they cry."

No fucking shit, GhoulSpawn.

Everything cried here.

The bones did.

The tide sucked in choked sobs with its backwash sloshing up against the black ooze scoured smooth on the cliff face.

Even those anemones – the ones BoomFuzzy had named “Cousin Gertie’s Delight” after he’d fished one too many out of his tea-steep last week - even those gurgled a kind of muffled whine when you pried their bell-shit open to see what goddamn thing crawled inside.

A pink silk slipper sucked down into the ooze, sucking the damned sound right out of its own scream.

It wouldn’t be pretty.

Not if it pulled through clean, anyway. If it snagged… then those anemones would be getting a good long look at some bone-white calf skin stretched taut across the ankle like a goddamn spider web waiting for something plump and stupid to blunder into its sticky centre.

“They cry,” BoomFuzzy purred behind him, low down on that scale somewhere between a cat’s contented rumble after it'd finished with what had once been a canary in some cage shaped like a rusted butter churn and the rasp of iron dragged across old bone.

"Always crying, those bones."

He smelled of something rotten enough to split a well-laid table set for tea if left unattended too long. The sour clotted milk scent from beneath the clove oil clinging greasy thick to those dreadlocks he hadn't bothered combing since before GhoulSpawn had gotten all twitchy and started muttering about numbers bleeding like that goddamn old hag’s boils.

Old Hag was a name reserved for certain moon phases, when BoomFuzzy swore even those anemones tasted less like boiled guts in brine and more like… well… what else could it be like? Like something you picked at with the wrong end of your fork after some cunt had already gnawed all around its edges and spat out what made it worth picking up in the first place.

BoomFuzzy wasn't wrong though, about those bones crying.

Sometimes they choked it down until even that taste went sour enough for him to choke on it himself. The bones didn’t cry like a babe snuffling wet-nosed into a rag spun from last week’s cabbage leaves gone bad.

Not exactly.

More like…

They whined like that rusted spigot back in the apothecary down the lane choked up by some goddamned thing no man had ever seen – hadn’t been meant to see, what with all the rot already bubbling over its rim like that one time when old Man-With-Teeth had gone missing for good after he swore it was staring at him through those cracked glass eyeholes in the back of the cabinet where they kept the pickled things.

Not even pickled right – just crammed in jars like some kind of mad larder’s fever dream, oozing out past the corked necks and down onto that warped wood floorboards smelling like goddamn wet dog and regret if you got too close.

The bones cried that way – with a sort of splintery whine worked up from the bottom of that rusty spigot in your skull where no water’d come for generations, just sediment thick enough to taste like grit under your tongue every damn time you cracked it open to see what was gnawing at its edges.

“What they cryin' about this time?” BoomFuzzy rasped.

He smelled faintly of that rusted spigot too, even through the clove and something else… a sour tang just behind the bone-meal dust like licking a finger dipped into a jar somebody’d left open on the back shelf above where the jars holding what was once geraniums sat sweating down all their goddamn pollen onto the lot below. Like trying to lick out the honey off that one dead bee they kept pinned under glass in that damned skull-and-crossbones cabinet next to the one with the pickled things.

“Something’s bleeding.”

The words were a choked thing from GhoulSpawn, coming out sideways like he was pulling them from somewhere past his jawbone before it even got down there, scraping on all those angles that stuck out wrong and wouldn't tuck neatly under his bony cheekbones the way normal things ought to.

"Something’s bleeding in the numbers."

The fog churned a deeper shade of bile-green closer than the rotten teacup stain on BoomFuzzy’s sleeve where he kept picking at it with one of those damned bone picks meant for loosening the gristle off the ribs when they were lucky enough to snag something bigger than a goddamn seagull's carcass.

“Always bleeding,” BoomFuzzy muttered.

He was right there, pressing close like something half-dissolved in vinegar would stick fast after that last bit of acid seeped through its skin and left you with just that damp, sour stink clinging to your insides.

Not exactly what it meant for a slipper soaked through black ooze slick as some long gone corpse’s eye socket to be right up against the back of your goddamn kneecap like something already half-digested and waiting for whatever goddamned thing lived in those bones to finally gnaw its way clear enough to spit out whatever that last taste was. It would get stuck there, wouldn't it? Would cling to that raw pink silk like some kind of… what the fuck did anemones smell like again? Like something you couldn’t quite swallow.

Not even when your tongue had already been gnawed loose enough to drag its whole goddamn tip sideways and scrape on those little sharp bones they called teeth back in whatever hellhole the midwife had dragged BoomFuzzy screaming out of before he got choked with that damned bone pick stuck down his throat somewhere between the wrong sort of moon phase and a bowl full of what was probably meant to be oat porridge but smelled like fish guts and old socks, all rolled together tight enough to choke a crow’s head off its damn spindly neck.

“Always bleeding,” BoomFuzzy purred again.

The bone pick scraped against his sleeve.

Maybe that stain really was just an artifact from the tea-steeping gone wrong this week. Or maybe it was what came off him when he got too close to whatever kept trying to claw out of those goddamn bones, whatever bled its way across GhoulSpawn’s counting skin like some unholy spiderweb strung tight enough even a seagull couldn't peck at its edges without snapping a wing and coming back down spitting feathers the color of bad pennies and regret.

“It wants… it wants…” GhoulSpawn coughed again.

Something snapped behind him, somewhere past that lick of black ooze clinging to bone-white calf skin like some unholy kind of prayer rug pinned down too tight by those goddamn anemones he was going to be sick if BoomFuzzy tried to get him to taste one more time before the moon crawled across its back half-drunk on blood and bad pennies.

"...it wants… in.”

Goddamn it.

The slipper sunk another inch deeper.

Black ooze sucked sideways, sucking the sound right out of that last little scrap of bone left unclaimed under GhoulSpawn's jawbone.

It wasn’t going to be pretty.

This way was never pretty.

Couldn’t remember ever being pretty.

Not when you were stuck on the cliff face above tidepool scoured slick with what hadn't been churned yet, what had just barely started gnawing itself free from whatever kept trying to pry loose those dead things beneath and whisper its goddamn numbers into the back of your skull where even the rusty spigot couldn’t reach them all before they got coughed up sideways in that same dry rasp that choked out GhoulSpawn's bone-pick teeth like a fish skeleton dragging against driftwood.

The bones were crying again.

They always did just before something broke open and spilled inside, didn’t they?

“Always bleeding,” BoomFuzzy murmured again.

He smelled faintly of those anemones now. Not the way he’d tasted them though – no, not like boiled guts and brine left over from the last time GhoulSpawn had tried to shove a goddamn calculus problem back down its gullet for spitting out numbers like they were bad pennies and regret in some unholy kind of prayer rug pinned too tight by bone pick teeth.

This time it was closer.

Closer than that, even.

Like something was rubbing the anemones on his sleeve raw enough to start smelling vaguely… fleshy. Like a fingertip dragged across an open wound trying to find where your tongue had already been picking at those goddamn things before they got too damned swollen.

Too fucking close, this time.

No pretty way out of it.

Never was.

Not when the salt went black and tasted like bone-meal dust on your insides and you were already choking down that same rotten teacup stain stuck to BoomFuzzy's sleeve where he kept picking at it with a damned bone pick meant for loosening gristle off the ribs, just trying to get the taste of brine out of your goddamn throat while all those bones cried their splintery whine from whatever goddamned spigot lived behind that rusted eyehole in whatever nightmare they were still bleeding from.

Not when GhoulSpawn kept coughing up numbers sideways and you hadn't even begun to remember what a goddamn number was supposed to look like before it turned sour enough to taste like fish guts and old socks, all rolled together tight enough to choke a crow’s head off its spindly neck anyway.

“Come on,” BoomFuzzy hissed somewhere behind that slick pink silk soaked sideways into black ooze smelling faintly of something dying sideways and humming its own particular strain of bad luck back up through the kelp beds toward an appetite waiting just out of sight under whatever kept spitting those anemones onto your goddamn tongue like some kind of mad god’s chewed-up birthday cake.

“Come on,” he rasped again, right against that lick of black ooze clinging to bone-white calf skin like some unholy kind of prayer rug pinned down too tight by those goddamn anemones. “The bones have teeth.”

Always bleeding.

Goddamn it.

Always crying.

And the fucking teeth—

There weren't supposed to be teeth.

Not for a while, not yet, not ever…

But then again, maybe it was always a goddamn while away. Maybe some things just gnawed slow enough you never even got around to noticing until something already tasted like bone-meal dust in your throat and the rusted spigot behind those damn eyeholes had gone dry enough for them to start whispering the numbers sideways through your cracked lip like GhoulSpawn before he choked on it all anyway.

And maybe— just maybe—

That wasn’t always what they were crying about. Not anymore, not ever again.

Maybe this time…

They just wanted to lick it out.

The taste was never so bad as that bone pick scraped across the raw pink silk and went too deep where GhoulSpawn finally choked on those goddamn numbers and you knew he’d swallowed them whole, all right.

Not pretty at all.

And never ever pretty again.

Always bleeding.

Goddamn it always bleeding.

Always.

And something was chewing its way through the skull-thin membrane stretched across your own goddamn gullet now to taste it.

The fog was a maw.

It pulled at Quaraun’s silk scarf, tasting of salt and something older. More ancient than bones. Something that smelled of Sorrow.

He hated this smell.

It seeped through the pores of his skin like rain on a rotten roof.

Hate-soaked sorrow.

Like watching your reflection claw back from the inside out.

“Stay close, JellyElf. They’re near.”

BoomFuzzy's touch was claws against pale silver silk at his neck—the way that blasted purple tail coiled around his hipbones always managed to feel like some obscene violation, like a constrictor on velvet. An affectionate, insistent constriction. A wordless comfort and threat all in one go. It shouldn’t have felt right after centuries of being crammed inside this brittle, cursed body. He tugged back anyway. A useless motion against that prehensile mass woven with dreadlocks smelling faintly of clove oil. The scent was like a goddamn nightmare in a perfume bottle, but BoomFuzzy swore it kept the things at bay.

It did something else too.

Echo, echo.

BoomFuzzy’s voice echoed louder than his words ought to have carried over those slick, black rocks. A trick of bone-thin mist that clung and breathed on bare skin like wet wool against a graveyard chill.

A prickle crawled across Quaraun’s scalp through the silver chains strung with rose beads that dangled from his ears. They tinkled as he shook his skull loose—a nervous twitch, always worse when they were in this damned place.

It should have been a haven.

A fucking tomb carved from granite and bone, bleached by winter sun like an old man’s teeth, overlooking the sea that ate itself alive on jagged rocks.

And it was.

It ought to have been safe.

Safe wasn't an emotion BoomFuzzy understood.

Didn't know how to even taste.

Not anymore.

The last time Quaraun had heard him talk about anything other than salt or rot he’d been two-hundred-and-twenty-two, back when a lick of bone meal could make you feel like a goddamn god and silk was the cheapest thing on the market.

“They’re near,” BoomFuzzy repeated, his breath hot on Quaraun's neck.

A fetid tang of boiled tripe mingled with clove oil that made him shudder.

"Stay close," he rasped, dragging a chipped fingernail down Quaraun's collarbone as if the silk itself wasn't clinging to his bones like a shroud of goddamn cobwebs already.

"They hate light and it’s all gone.”

GhoulSpawn’s high-pitched squeak had the pitch of rusty hinges on a broken door.

“Dude, there—something in the mist,” he said, backing away from the cliff edge as if even gravity was going to turn against them.

It wouldn't be fair, not yet anyway.

Not after BoomFuzzy spent what felt like years convincing everyone that this cursed rock needed another ten thousand fucking human sacrifices before it would stop spewing up dead fish and screaming wind.

Ten thousand!

The goddamn UnSeelie Court had been making do with two dozen or so fresh corpses from the mainland when they ran low on the island’s natural stock.

GhoulSpawn's eyes were already wide enough to swallow his skull, but then he was always that close to a seizure anyway.

"Those damn things hate light and—" BoomFuzzy started to say.

He broke off with a snarl that sounded like bones grinding together—like someone dragging his jaw back over one hundred thousand years of bonemeal dust—

"Don’t stand there gaping, you stupid, sheep-headed fuck. We need more sacrifices. Light hurts them."

The fog pulsed closer, thick and oily on the black stone paving slabs of the path they picked their way down.

A taste lingered on Quaraun's tongue - stale brine, rotten eggs, burnt bone, and that thing—the thing he hated most: Sorrow.

Too sharp to smell; too blunt to see; just a wordless pressure against his eyeballs like trying to lift your head from beneath five tons of wet wool. He wanted to scream into it and drown all sound.

But the fog was already filling him up with shapes, crawling through gaps between rock and silk where the pale silver clung like frozen tears.

They were shadows that tasted like blood in his veins, thick and sluggish, like trying to think after a long dream of being hung upside down by your feet from one of those stupid iron hooks BoomFuzzy liked so much—you know, the ones he used to haul up all those nice, fat little fish guts for supper. Fish guts that smelled exactly like the dead things in the mist.

Like salt and bones and old wounds and sorrow wrapped together like a goddamn corpse-hugging blanket.

"There's no need to be so dramatic," GhoulSpawn mumbled, backing away from the cliff edge with each slithering step they took.

He was trying not to touch the ground, which meant he was trying to levitate in this thin air above these damn rocks. He'd been doing that a lot more lately.

"They’re just—well. They are kind of vague."

“Quiet,” BoomFuzzy hissed. "You can see them because you have no bloody tastebuds for once.”

And then, after a long second pause where he licked his fangs on both sides with the grace of a cat and the noise of something wet ripping across granite, added:

“They’re near enough to touch now. The echo of bone is strong."

He was still standing there with his hands tucked deep in the pockets of that disgusting patchwork thing he wore instead of trousers—a goddamn insult to all self-respecting necromancers, especially one who had to wear the silk he bought for this.

"You can’t see them because they are very close.”

And if you squinted hard enough through those layers of salt crusts and that goddamn fog... there was a face in every ripple of it now.

A hundred faces pressed flat against the glass like flies behind cobwebbed windows, their edges blurred and running together so quickly that the whole damned landscape seemed to be swimming with them.

"They're just—looking," GhoulSpawn insisted, even though he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding his voice at all. "You know. For—like—for some... for something."

He looked back over his shoulder as if the UnSeelie Court had an escape hatch somewhere in that wall behind them.

"Do you want to hear the word, GhoulSpawn?" Quaraun asked.

He could feel BoomFuzzy's claws like needles under his collarbone again, scratching at his skin where he’d been trying to lick away the clammy, oily dread of this place.

A taste that was so wrong for silk.

He wished those things would just stop crawling and go back to rotting in the sea.

The word choked him as it always did.

"Banshee," Quaraun rasped out, though it might have been better not to say it aloud at all.

Because there was a way BoomFuzzy could tell.

Not with any goddamn eyes that were left, but the dead never had the sense anyway, did they?

No, the Lich just knew.

He always knew.

He always smelled like he knew.

The whole of this place smelled like he knew.

Like knowing was a flavour you tasted on your tongue in an old tomb and licked from under your nails when you woke up with that kind of fog in your bones.

GhoulSpawn’s eyes went wide again, even wider than before—and then squeezed shut so tight Quaraun could hear the soft scrape of bone against skull.

“Don't want to,” GhoulSpawn whimpered through all his teeth. "No need for that."

"There is a sound they make, GhoulSpawn," BoomFuzzy said softly, but with all the force of an anchor dragging in its iron shroud.

It was a slow, deliberate thing.

He didn’t even blink.

His voice rasped like the tide against bone when it took those long slow breaths and drew air through that hole where his nose ought to have been—and for sure he wasn't going to try and cover up the stink of fish guts in what smelled an awful lot like salt-baked misery.

And just as BoomFuzzy didn’t say it aloud, Quaraun couldn’t think it anymore either: They are coming.

The fog pressed closer, turning thick enough to swallow sound.

Thick enough to taste.

Thick enough for a Banshee's Echo— the one word that tasted like the worst kind of bad news wrapped up in cold iron and old teeth—to crawl into the gaps between his ribs and claw at his lungs.

"They are almost here."

The wind howled.

It was not just wind.

No. Not natural.

Quaraun knew the sound.

Wailing. A Banshee’s wailing. The fog was alive.

Thick. Pale silver. Heavy.

Crawling across his pink silks. Damp earth on his tongue. Cold mist clung like webbing. Bitter. Dry. Salted fish and black bread churned in his stomach. He hated black bread. He hated fish. He hated fog.

“Elf.”

Unicorn’s hand.

Dark.

Heavy.

Strong.

The scent of the Faerie King. Quaraun knew he was there without seeing him or hearing him.

Clove oil.

Gingerbread.

Absinthe. Quaraun’s thoughts spiralled.

Drunken. Obsessive.

He loved the Unicorn. It distracted him from the task at hand.

Unicorn was too close.

Too close.

Not close enough.

Never close enough.

He wanted. Needed. Hungered. For the Unicorn. Dead. The Faerie had died three centuries ago. No more flesh, the Faerie King was a ghost whom haunted him now.

Quaraun stood in the graveyard on the cliff. Listening. Watching. waiting. It was difficult to be a necromancer and seek out the dead, when the dead were in the habit of always following you around. The Lich King’s seductive touch filled his mind.

“Back off,” Quaraun snarled. “I need to hear the other ghosts. Not you.”

BoomFuzzy drifted back to GhoulSpawn’s side instead.

“The Elf hears it,” BoomFuzzy muttered to GhoulSpawn.

“I hear it,” GhoulSpawn whimpered. “What is it?”

“Ghosts.”

“Like you?”

“None are like me. I’s a Lich.”

A loud shriek echoed through the fog. GhoulSpawn covered his flip-floppy lamp ears.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The banshee cry,” BoomFuzzy replied. “The echo in the fog. A right fuckin’ funeral song.”

Quaraun’s eye twitched.

“Funeral,” the Pink Necromancer repeated. “Death. Cry. Crying echoes. Sorrow. Grief. The fog is sorrow. It mourns.”

“Ya always mournin’ something, JellyBrains.” BoomFuzzy drifted back to Quaraun and leaned close. Hot breath. Cold lips. Wet mouth pressed to Quaraun’s ear. “Mourn me. Mourn this. Mourn yer pearly arse sittin’ on me lap.”

Quaraun pushed the Lich away.

“Not now. Not now. I hear voices.”

“Ya always hearin’ voices, Love. Got yarself a JellyFish gnawing on ya brain.”

“Not those voices. Others.”

GhoulSpawn fidgeted at the graveyard gate. Cloven hooves on frozen stone.

Click. Clack. Click.

Nervous rhythm. Sheep’s wool smell. Wet fleece. His soft curls dripped with mist. He looked lost. He was always lost.

“Guys…” GhoulSpawn’s voice broke. “There’s… movement… like… not good… Between the graves. I saw… shadows.”

“Shadows walk when I call them,” Quaraun said.

“You didn’t call these.”

Quaraun did not like that answer. He clutched his cane tighter. Gold glove stiff. His fingers could not close. Twisted. Broken. Useless. But his wand… his Rainbow Wand lived in his hand like a serpent.

He raised it. Moonstone gleamed. Fog shimmered.

Something screamed.

The cry ripped through the mist.

Banshee.

Wailing.

Grief. Bitter grief. Sorrow thick enough to taste.

Quaraun shivered.

“I hate the sound. I hate it. It echoes in my head.”

“Cryin’ for yer soul, Love,” BoomFuzzy said. “It wants ya. Wants me. Wants the Goat. Ghosts always want me Goat.”

“I am not — ” GhoulSpawn’s voice cracked. “I’m a Sheep!”

“Ya a goat, Laddie. Goat math wizard. Crunch yer numbers. Count the bones.”

GhoulSpawn shifted uneasily. His eyes glowed gold. Equations flickered there. Math written in terror.

“Dude, I can’t count bones in the fog. I can’t count anything in this fog. I don’t even want to count bones! Why are we in a graveyard? I don’t want to be in a graveyard.”

“Silence!” Quaraun hissed. “I must think. I must concentrate.”

He could not think. The wailing shredded thought. His head swarmed. Hair writhed. Jellyfish tentacles coiling around his throat. His own hair choking him. He pulled at it. Snarled.

“Stop it!” He scolded his hair.

BoomFuzzy chuckled.

“Yer hair loves ya more than I do.”

“Nothing loves more than you do.”

“True, Love. I fuckin’ adore ya.” He pinched Quaraun’s arse.

“Stop that!” Quaraun shrieked. “The dead are watching.”

“So let ’em watch.”

The fog swelled.

Thick.

Pulsing.

Graveyard stones leaned closer. Not leaning. Moving. Sliding. Closing in.

GhoulSpawn whimpered.

“Uhm… Guys… the graves are… uhm… yeah. They’re moving.”

“They are always moving,” Quaraun muttered. “Graves move. Bones rattle. The fog hides. Fog eats. I hate fog.”

A shape lurked. Pale silver shimmer. Hollow face. Empty sockets. Long black hair dripping seaweed. Water running down its gown. Mouth wide.

Crying. Wailing.

The banshee.

Quaraun’s knees buckled. Pain shot up his bad leg. He stumbled. BoomFuzzy caught him. Tight. Strong. The Unicorn’s big fluffy purple tail wrapped his waist.

“Stand, JellyElf.”

“I can not. My leg. My damned leg!”

“Then I carry ya.”

“I will walk. I must walk.”

He forced his weight on the cane. Every step agony. Agony and silk. Silk dragging wet across stone. Rose petals clinging to his feet.

“Elf,” BoomFuzzy warned. “It comes closer.”

“Then kill it!”

“I fuckin’ love it when ya boss me ‘round. Do it again.”

“Will you stop seducing me and obliterate the damned banshee we came here to banish!”

BoomFuzzy leapt. Dark brown skin melting to lilac hide as the Faerie king transformed into his Unicorn form.

The Unicorn King.

Horn glimmering silver.

His hooves cracked the frozen soil.

He charged into the fog.

The banshee screamed louder. Crying echo in the mist. The sound split Quaraun’s skull. He dropped his cane. Clutched his head. Blood in his nose. Bitter. Dry. Cold.

GhoulSpawn crouched beside him.

“Dude! you’re like bleeding all over the place!”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“You okay?”

“I am never okay.”

“Dude, I can build — something. Like a… frequency disruptor. Cancel the wailing. Might stop the bleeding.”

“Do it then!”

“I don’t have the parts!”

“Then you are useless!”

GhoulSpawn’s long floppy ears flattened. He did not argue. He never argued. Not with Quaraun. Not when Quaraun’s eyes burned pink fire.

BoomFuzzy slammed into the banshee. They tangled. Horn through mist. Shadow blood sprayed. Cold wind scattered it like glass shards.

The banshee screamed one last time.

Sorrow broke.

Echo cracked.

Fog shivered.

Gone.

Silence.

Graveyard still again.

BoomFuzzy shifted back into his Humanoid form. Sweat and seaweed and clove oil. He wrapped his strong arms around Quaraun. Kissed his neck.

“See? Easy. All ya needed was me big horn rammed up her arse.”

Quaraun shoved him.

“You are crude.”

“Aye.”

“Crude and vulgar.”

“And ya love it.”

“Yes. But there is a time and a place and in case you hadn’t noticed I am fucking bleeding all over fucking shit! My silks are ruined!”

“Ah, so we should strip ya naked and toss ya in a bathtub, eh?”

“That is not what I said.”

“It what I heard.”

“You are impossible!”

GhoulSpawn sighed.

“So… uh. Dinner?”

“I am not hungry,” Quaraun muttered. His stomach growled. Bitter black bread taste still on his tongue.

“I am hungry,” BoomFuzzy said. “Always hungry. Horny too.”

“Shut up.”

GhoulSpawn rubbed his arm.

“Seriously though. I think it’s gone.”

Quaraun stared into the fog. Moonstone glimmer. Cold mist licking his silk.

“Nothing is ever gone.”

His eye twitched.

The fog stirred again.

Slow blink in silver. Not fast enough for a pulse, not like GhoulSpawn’s frantic flick-thwack of cloven hooves on chipped slate when nerves were strung tight as sheepbells.

Or sheel balls.

This was deeper breath-pulses beneath frost crust. Underneath frozen sodden earth. A breathing that rumbled the airbones in Quaraun’s own skull like a pissed-off ghaist with a head full of stone and spiders –

The wind wasn't just wind anymore.

Not even natural wind howling down off the clifftop here, gnawing at the rotten carcass of this forgotten Irish patch God probably forgot to piss on good enough. Wind could lick salt spray up from the drowned sea miles back, past the cliffs that clawed like broken teeth at storm-swallowed sky. Could spit sleet-needles hard as needles through the bone-thin wool clinging to GhoulSpawn’s flanks. This was something else pushing against Quaraun's ruined silks – a shove not of salt and piss-rain but of wrongness like damp fingers trailing down the inside of his skull from above, burrowing into his pink hair roots.

“It thinks,” BoomFuzzy growled deep in his throat – voice rusty as an axehead shoved too far into rotted oak. “It thinks.”

Which was worse than any banshee’s wail. Worse even than the stink of curdled gingerbread and clove oil that meant the Unicorn was close enough to lick his neck if Quaraun tilted his chin up just so.

He didn't want that now.

Not gingerfuck breath on a throat slick with blood from cracked lip stitches that hadn’t set straight – the apothecary in town swore he could see a future where “straight” wasn’t even an option for Quaraun’s jaw anymore.

GhoulSpawn sucked on his thumb.

A fat wet ‘pop’ of bone-white against pale wool-damp, and the sound somehow scraped dirtier than BoomFuzzy’s voice.

Always with that sucking.

Always gnawing.

Never swallowed.

Like trying to eat a storm cloud whole – a taste you could keep forever but never got down past the throat where something might break apart for chewing.

"It thinks about bones," GhoulSpawn wheezed out, and he was always wheezing.

Not asthma wheezes, not like some scrawny goat coughed up from an ash pile to sing hymns of sulfur, no – this was a wheezing more like the kind that crawled into your gut when yer stomach had gone all wrong inside yerself and started chewing on whatever it thought were wronger bits first.

"Bones," GhoulSpawn rasped again. "A lot of bones."

The kid dragged his hooves back from the nearest mausoleum – granite slab cracked down like an egg with a bad day, moss sprouting from what should have been teeth grinning up through dirt-choked mortar.

"Too many to count."

He looked at BoomFuzzy's flank where it bulged purple and hairy still with ghost-muscle beneath thin human skin.

"You do the math, Goat. How many bones make a... what?"

"I'm a Sheep."

“A pile,” BoomFuzzy snarled out low.

Not his usual cloying honeyed rumble when he was all sweet rotted gingerbread for Quaraun to choke on and pretend wasn’t there. This growl scraped like bone-saw against stone-slab teeth in an empty tomb. He took a step – and one of these fuckery things that made the graveyard tilt sideways didn't even try to hide anymore, just stood.

Not stood upright, mind.

Not like GhoulSpawn twitching on his spindly legs with hooves like mismatched cast-offs from an angry god's sock drawer.

This thing… it was a mound of black earth and chipped marble dust that looked like it might be wearing trousers once made for a tailor who’d gone off the rails doing too many ‘mourning suits’ in midnight blue velvet. Only here they were stitched with slivers of obsidian that glittered wrong, like broken dreams you could rub on a wound but wouldn't help no matter how you twisted the grit under calloused thumbs.

“A pile,” BoomFuzzy said again – this time so tight it squeezed right through Quaraun even though the Unicorn wasn’t touching him.

The word was damp moss and rusted iron shackles clinking. It tasted like the inside of a skull after some goblin had gnawed on the grey bits too long, spitting out what couldn't be crushed into slurry.

"A pile of bones is just not enough for this."

“It needs more,” GhoulSpawn whimpered.

His suck-pop got loud then – not like a thumb but like swallowing pebbles and trying to force 'em down wrong, like yer windpipe was full of brittle twigs you couldn't swallow fast enough.

"Not… counting... bones just… ‘more’… It needs…”

The thing crouched deeper into the graveyard mud. Each patch of moss it dragged itself through turned white then blacker than any moonless night sky Quaraun'd crawled through in his days back when he still thought he could scrape a future clean enough to make decent finger-paintings on. This wasn’t moss – this was what grew on your insides after you swallowed rot long enough it made itself into something else and started singing about gnawing. Singing about gnawing.

A song like this, though… this one didn't have words Quaraun could taste in the back of his throat. It had gaps where syllables should have been – all choked off by that sucking sound GhoulSpawn was doing now – only louder now. More frantic like he wasn’t eating a cloud anymore but trying to eat an entire sky full of them and the wind just shoved more in with every snap of his maw closed.

“Something bigger,” GhoulSpawn hissed, sucking in enough air for two men after hauling themselves back up from drownings no one else thought they were deep enough for. “More… more…”

His little hooves scraped on stones now – not clicking-clacking like he was trying to tell a rhythm nobody wanted to hear, but dragging sideways against each slab like he’d decided the only way to get through this graveyard wouldn't be stepping over but burrowing into it and letting earth fill in whatever the hell was left of space.

“That’s what I hate about necromancy,” Quaraun croaked.

The fog clung to Quaraun like a shroud, chilling him to the bone despite his silk slippers.

"Damn it all to Hell! Another blasted Maine winter."

He gritted his teeth, forcing down the tremor that ran through him. BoomFuzzy’s unnervingly calm chuckle scraped against Quaraun’s frayed nerves.

“Scared, love?”

The Phooka draped a meaty arm around Quaraun’s waist, his touch possessive and warm despite the biting wind whipping off the churning Atlantic.

“No,” Quaraun snarled, pulling away just enough to glare at BoomFuzzy’s smug grin.

He hated that knowing smirk, like BoomFuzzy held all the secrets of the universe, and Quaraun was a mewling kitten desperate for scraps.

He wasn’t! Not anymore. Not since... since the Fracture Moon.

“Sure ya be,” BoomFuzzy drawled, his voice a purr laced with amusement.

The clove oil clinging to his dreadlocks tickled Quaraun’s nose, a scent both comforting and maddeningly distracting.

GhoulSpawn, bless his simple soul, was busy counting the swirling eddies in the fog, muttering about fractal patterns and prime numbers.

“Two hundred and forty-seven…two hundred and forty-eight…the density fluctuations…”

“They’re here,” Quaraun hissed, tugging his silver chains – a painful reminder of his broken wings – tighter against his ribs. The fog pulsed, no longer a formless gray but tinged with sickly pale silver. The air tasted metallic, sharp with sorrow. He could feel it, a tide of despair rolling in, thick and cold as grave-damp earth. Banshees.

A chorus of mournful cries sliced through the wind, echoing off the lichen-covered tombstones that crowded the cliffside graveyard.

Shadows coalesced, taking on vague humanoid forms, their features perpetually locked in a silent scream. Faces etched with an ageless agony, they reached for them with translucent fingers, grasping at nothing, yearning.

“Focus, JellyLove,” BoomFuzzy murmured, his hand finding its familiar place on the small of Quaraun’s back, anchoring him. “Let their sorrow fuel you.”

Quaraun snarled, drawing power from the encroaching despair, weaving a psychic shield around them.

It shimmered, iridescent and fragile, like spun moonlight catching on spiderwebs. He could taste the echo of their anguish, bitter and raw, feeding into his own well of inner torment. He channeled it, bending it, twisting it into a cage of psionic force to hold back the tide of wailing wraiths.

GhoulSpawn finally looked up from his calculations, eyes wide with a dawning comprehension.

“They’re feeding off our collective…emotional resonance! Like some kind of psychic parasite hive mind!” He fumbled for something in his satchel, pulling out a worn book bound in blackened sheepskin. “I theorized this might happen! Chapter 7, subsection Gamma-Delta: ‘Necromantic Resonance and the Unseen Chorus.’ See, I told you there was a mathematical basis for—"

“Quiet, Glinta,” Quaraun snapped, his voice strained.

His mind throbbed with the banshees’ cries, their yearning sorrow pressing against his defenses like icy claws.

“Just…stay close.”

He glanced at BoomFuzzy, who was humming a jaunty tune under his breath, nonchalantly stirring a cauldron of bubbling black broth that reeked of salt fish and something distinctly...unnatural.

“Don’t worry, love,” BoomFuzzy crooned, handing Quaraun a ladleful of the steaming stew. “A little cry never hurt nobody. Besides, think of it as a free emotional boost for your psionics!”

He winked, his violet eyes glittering with unholy amusement. The warmth of the broth momentarily calmed the roiling anxiety in Quaraun’s gut.

It tasted of home, of BoomFuzzy’s chaotic love, and something faintly metallic, like old blood.

A comforting, if unsettling, flavour.

Quaraun forced down the stew, knowing every sip fuelled his power. The banshees pressed harder, their wails turning into guttural moans as they sensed his weakening resolve. He squeezed BoomFuzzy’s hand, drawing strength from the familiar warmth, from the reassuring pressure of the Phooka’s prehensile tail snaking around them both, anchoring him to reality.

“Quaraun,” GhoulSpawn said, voice tight with a rare hint of fear, “The emotional resonance is destabilizing the very fabric of this dimension! We’re losing…ground!”

“Then we fight,” Quaraun rasped, his gaze hardening.

He raised his hands, weaving psionic threads of light and shadow, a tapestry of despair and defiance. The banshees shrieked, their forms flickering as they met his psychic assault. He would not yield.

Not here.

Not now.

Not while BoomFuzzy's love thrummed against him, a beacon in the encroaching darkness.

He didn’t have the blood for a full whine, not yet. Not with BoomFuzzy sweating clove oil so thick on his skin you could taste it in the back of your own throat like choking on bad perfume and burnt sugar at a funeral where someone forgot to turn off the oven before they dragged the corpse out.

"Always gotta be more."

He shoved one hand into that goddamn silk pocket sewn up by some ghoul-fucked seamstress who didn’t believe in hems or straight seams or anything sensible - just layers of pink like the inside of somebody's chest cavity after a crow’d pecked at 'em good enough to see the ribs poking through.

Fingers found his wand.

Moonstone cold as a fistful of dead sea slugs shoved against an ice cave floor. It didn't feel right now. Not pointy and sharp-edged like it should for when the world was leaking too much blood and you needed to cut it back – not pointy enough to gouge something out of the fog that ate sound slower than a hungry rat gnawing on a damp loaf in the cellar behind Mrs. O’Malley's bakery, where bread meant stale crusts even if God Himself blessed the dough when he was passing over. It felt blunt. Like chewing on bone-dust that never settled into anything sharper than gravel.

“It wants… you,” GhoulSpawn croaked out – sucked in a breath like it wasn't just air, but trying to suck up the fog itself to see what tasted like more of that, and choked so hard on whatever he’d swallowed down with it that his wool-thingy burst right then into a cloud of yellowed lint and stink like an old sock soaked in sheepshit and left hanging too long from the back porch railing after rain. "Bones... don't matter… anymore..."

The thing shifted sideways – not slow, like it had been letting itself rot over centuries while pretending to be landscaping. Now it did that wriggle you saw when the tide pulled a dead fish free from under rocks but didn’t know what to do with it being dragged into the light again. A spasm of black and broken china blue and something else - a shimmer like fat wasps' wings caught on spider-silk stretched tight enough you could see through them both ways at once – and for that split second Quaraun thought he saw two eyes where there shouldn’t have been any. Like a skull trying to remember what seeing was supposed to be before it got all choked up in the wrong kind of damp moss, and not even remembering if it wanted to see again anyway…

“You see how many teeth are still left,” BoomFuzzy said.

It wasn’t an answer to Quaraun asking anything – he hadn't.

The Unicorn was close enough now that his damn cloven hoof-nails scraped against the polished bone of Quaraun’s shin like a rusty saw trying to cut through what little metal plating held the joint together after those bastards in the Iron Brigade had thought ‘pink silks’ and ‘can’t walk straight anyway’ meant ‘let’s give him a leg he can use for target practice’ – but BoomFuzzy was close enough that when his breath hit you it felt less like gingerfuck rot and more like that moment when all the heat goes out of the chimney just before rain starts, so even though your hearth’s still warm underfoot, you gotta pull on another shawl anyway because somewhere a cold thing just decided you were gonna be its next guest room.

The Unicorn was looking at the thing in the graveyard mud – not staring with his normal kind of stupid-pretty blind eyes like they were trying to see what shade of bruised plum Quaraun's spit would have been if he hadn’t choked down so damn much blood-wine last week when that bitch Moira had told him no, he couldn’t do the funeral for Mr. Finnigan because it was ‘not in his contract’ and apparently contracts were bigger than a necromancer needing a job with anything more than smelling salts and salt pork crusts clinging to bone scraps for payment - BoomFuzzy wasn't looking at it like that.

He was seeing inside something. Like he could smell the wrongness of an old sheep dying on damp straw in the barn you knew better not to go near after dark, but worse. More than stink. This smelled like missing. Like if a songbird had tried singing itself out of existence, and only what was left after it went quiet got shoved back into the cage for other birds to peck at until they figured out that silence wasn't anything you could eat.

“Teeth,” BoomFuzzy rasped – voice gone all thin like an old woman spitting a threadbare prayer into smoke from a cracked oil lamp and hoping nobody’d noticed how much blacker than charcoal her breath was lately, “that many teeth.” He took another step – closer than he should’ve been, even with the way that thing in the graveyard mud kept doing whatever-the-hell it did to stay still while sucking air back into a hole where there shouldn’t have been one. “Not bones…”

The Unicorn was sweating clove oil so thick now Quaraun could taste it right through his own busted lip stitches and half-rotted blood clots, but this wasn't that good rot smell like honeyed rust eaten by wasps after a long rain - this was the kind where the sugar had gone bad enough to ferment in its own jar. Like if somebody’d tried to make perfume out of burnt-down churches and old dreams chipped off tombstones on a night when thunder rattled the sky too close for comfort, like it wasn't supposed to be that high up.

“Teeth,” BoomFuzzy hissed again - voice tighter than that. Not like he was choking down gingerfuck, but like somebody else had shoved a fistful of grit down his own gullet and was making him cough until the gravel came out sideways through a hole nobody’d bothered to sew shut good enough first. “Not bones… teeth…”

The thing in the graveyard mud went still. Stiller even than it’d been when trying to pretend it wasn't there, which hadn't been a lot of work because this kind of "still" was less 'sitting in an empty church watching dust motes dance with whatever sunbeams dared get through cracked stained glass' and more like a bad sketch your drunk uncle did on the back of a napkin at Thanksgiving - all jagged edges and trying too hard to be something you knew wasn’t meant to work when he swore up and down it was gonna look like the goddamn Queen of Sheba if you just squinted sideways enough, so you didn't want to point out how she’d got eight eyes and only three fingers on her left hand but mostly because nobody had told him that half-dead cockroaches were bad for your art supplies. You couldn’t tell if it wasn't breathing or if breath was just what went wrong when you sucked up a thing like this too far down, leaving the air in its lungs tasting like trying to lick rusty hinges after somebody’d greased ‘em with sheep eyeballs and old candlewax from funerals nobody mourned enough to light for properly.

"Teeth," BoomFuzzy said again - voice all gone thin like a girlbird that'd been dipped in tar and hung up to dry too soon, so now she chirp-cried out the wrong kind of things when you poked her with your thumb and hoped maybe if she sang loud enough nobody’d notice how brittle it was now, ‘cause bone… bone broke real easy.

GhoulSpawn whimpered once – that sucked-down swallowing sound gone all sour like a penny-sweet dipped in moldy jam and left to sit on the bottom of somebody's pocket for months so now you only tasted vinegar when you squeezed it between your teeth but maybe it would explode if you pressed too hard.

"More teeth," BoomFuzzy choked out – that clove oil smell gone thick as bad honey, slicker than a greased corpse being dragged down cobblestones to the water’s edge.

“More…"

Then the thing in the graveyard mud let go of still – not slow, but like somebody punched it awake with one too many years stuffed into the wrong kind of coffin nails and now all you heard was how far back they shoved that damn hammer, not even 'what' got hammered in just how much clanging-metal trying to burrow its way through a thing that shouldn’t have had space to let metal go anywhere except sideways. Sideways enough to crack the frost-glass of whatever sky hung over this goddamn Irish patch where God wasn’t supposed to be able to spit rain hard enough to drown even a puddle, so if it rained here at all, what came down was mostly just something like trying – and that was worse than the salt spray.

Worse than the salt spray because you could wash that off.

You could boil the ocean till it choked on steam and maybe taste some kind of clean again after that.

But there wasn't enough water in the world to rinse out this sideways-enough. Not even if you drowned yourself deep enough for the fish down there to start nibbling your ears when they got bored with what they knew was already too much bone dust already floating past their nostrils and they figured maybe you’d taste different, like that old joke about a man walking into a library and ordering soup.

BoomFuzzy didn't try to run.

He just went whiter than his usual shade of bruise-plum – though when you were this thick with sweat, even 'bruise-plum' didn't mean much anymore, it was more like you were trying to describe the stink on the back of a dead rat dragged through lavender after somebody’d tried to make a perfume out of embalming fluid and regret.

Unicorn just went madder - eyes gone so flat that what remained wasn't even seeing but something that looked like trying to swallow down enough shadow to see if it tasted like remembering how many stars were supposed to be in a sky before they got all clogged with cobwebs spun from too much wrongness and nobody could remember if there was any difference anymore between the ones you wanted up there blinking and the ones that just crawled on your eyelids until you wished you’d been born blind.

GhoulSpawn swallowed again – like he wasn't swallowing air this time, more like trying to pull back down his own wool-damp so it wouldn’t spill out in a cloud that turned the colour of rotten milk and tasted like sucking up half your insides just because somebody forgot you were there.

Except he didn't have enough lungs for that – not anymore.

Not when what was left was all thin ribcage stretched too tight over a bagpipe belly that wasn’t puffed with air but with something else trying to squeeze its way out sideways like it thought the world would break better if it just split open enough at the seams where those bones shouldn't have been poking so damn straight through. He sucked in a breath - tasted wrong for maybe twenty breaths after, like you licked the inside of a tomb that hadn’t been scrubbed clean since the last plague because somebody figured 'they all dead anyway' meant no reason to worry about smells being bad even when they crawled up your nose with fat-thick spiders crawling on their backs and legs still twitching like you were watching them eat their own guts, though nobody could say if they chewed it or swallowed - the kind of breath that left behind a taste like trying to drink out of a gourd where somebody’s been chewing stale rye bread dipped in blood-clot thickener and praying for deliverance.

The thing… well.

It hadn't moved sideways enough yet.

Not quite.

Like it wasn’t sure if the wrongness was supposed to spill out like mud from an overstuffed boot or try being a crack running down pavement where you thought maybe there'd be more road underneath but the cracks already gone too deep and nobody could ever get the tar-black gunk out of their fingernails after they tried shoveling it back in.

But the wrongness… the wrongness smelled like trying to shove that mud back into your throat, even though you knew if you did maybe all you'd taste would be the kind of rust you couldn’t scrape off with a knife but had to wait for sun and wind and years of rain just to lick away enough to see what colour it should have been before it got this thick in everything wrong.

“More,” BoomFuzzy rasped – voice gone thin as somebody tried sucking down all the sound from the last dying breaths of that old ram you knew shouldn’t be smelled anymore but kept finding its way back into things anyway, like a bad smell stuck under your fingernail after picking at scabs you never should have let go hard enough in the first place.

“More teeth… more… MORE.”

He choked something down sideways – not breath this time, more like swallowed light trying to turn inside out and make itself into shadow again because that was easier than burning through what little colour hadn't already bled away from it.

GhoulSpawn coughed up a sound - less like air got jammed somewhere and stuck there till you had to claw your way back up through its wrongness with ribs that didn't bend enough anymore, more like that sucking-down breath turned inside out again but this time you were supposed to taste what it did to the insides of things.

Tasteless.

Mostly just… empty.

Like trying to lick a hole in a world where somebody figured half-finished wouldn’t be good enough and then they forgot why ‘wasn’t’ was even there, so now everything just stared with too many teeth on the wrong side of its jaw.

The thing in the graveyard mud went sideways.

Not yet enough to split open like a rotten plum somebody tried squeezing juice from but not quite not.

Enough that if this patch of Irish sky ever got angry enough to spit rain, you'd hope it wasn’t aiming for you 'cause even salt wouldn't do shit for what was starting to taste like swallowing down an echo where the sound forgot what it had been trying to say so all you got left were these splinters of wrongness gnawing at your back teeth and maybe if you held your tongue just right in a way nobody ever taught you, could maybe almost smell like enough was there that should've been swallowed but never stayed down long enough to know better.

Not yet.

But… closer.

"More," BoomFuzzy rasped - voice gone thin as somebody tried sucking down all the sound from the last dying breaths of that old goat you knew shouldn’t be smelled anymore but kept finding its way back into things anyway, like a bad smell stuck under your fingernail after picking at scabs you never should have let go hard enough in the first place.

“More teeth… more…”

And GhoulSpawn didn’t cough.

Didn't suck.

Didn't even whimper like he was trying to swallow down half his own insides because maybe that wouldn’t make it taste as bad if you crammed it somewhere else, deeper.

He just sat there - hunched over sideways like a puppet somebody stopped pulling strings for when they got bored but then forgot what being looked like after the show closed and all that was left were these limbs poking out of too much shadow and maybe he remembered enough to keep them twitching right even if nobody knew what song his bones were supposed to tap out to anymore.

And that empty taste…

Well, that empty taste crawled up into your throat like trying to lick a hole in the world where somebody figured half-finished wouldn’t be good enough and then they forgot why ‘wasn’t’ was even there, so now everything just stared with too many teeth on the wrong side of its jaw.

And it started to drip.

Drip slow like rain that shouldn't have been able to happen here because even if God tried spitting down hard enough nobody could say what would stick - salt-spray wasn’t supposed to bleed, was it?

But this… this bled like you got too close to the part of a dead thing where somebody'd left the guts tangled in its own skin instead of unfurling 'em right before they shoved dirt in.

And it started to smell.

More than clove oil sweat and bad breath after sucking down shadows till you tasted bone splinters instead of teeth, more like what you smelled when nobody ever told you how a tongue should taste if the world got done being quiet long enough to let its insides seep out sideways but they didn't tell you how slow that 'slow' was supposed to go and some mornings it just wasn’t even there to swallow down anymore, not till the last thing left tasted like forgetting you ever ate breakfast in the first place.

It smelled wronger than knowing what colour a dead moose should be if nobody bothered burying it deep enough, so now all you got was that greasy grey bloom on top and maybe if you held your tongue just right you could almost taste the fur rubbing against your teeth instead of whatever that other stuff was, but nobody told you if it was supposed to stay that way long enough to remember.

And the thing in the graveyard mud...

Well, it wasn't spitting open yet - not good and wide like somebody finally choked down too much wrongness and figured maybe bursting sideways would make room for something else to come chewing up behind, but it shifted.

Shifted more than a crack should when you tried shoveling tar-black gunk back in.

More like trying to unbend that rusty old hinge on the barn door after they finally forgot what 'up' was supposed to mean and now it just hung there half-stuck in whatever angle felt good enough for the splinters crawling down from the roof beams to poke at your face when the wind blew sideways instead of right or left, and maybe if you squeezed your eyes tight enough and didn’t smell that rust-licked cobweb stuff clinging between your teeth, it wouldn't even be worth worrying if what was hanging off the edge would ever swing all the way down because you knew better than to go poke at hinges anymore.

But here… here...

It wasn't just the hinge not wanting to swing all the way 'cause maybe that rusty angle had been there so damn long nobody remembered how it should look unbent anymore. It was like somebody shoved another hinge in sideways too, but this one didn't even try being rusty. This one smelled like trying to lick a hole where someone forgot they ate breakfast and figured maybe if you kept chewing on the echo of what was supposed to be toast-and-jam, eventually it’d grow back inside and taste better the second time around, but all that came out was this greasy grey bloom on your tongue and maybe if you held it just right against your teeth, you could almost taste the fur rubbing against them instead of whatever else was there, but nobody told you how long a memory should last before spitting up its insides.

That's what it smelled like trying to pry open - not hinges so much as trying to unbend the echo of what should have stayed swallowed down and forgotten and now all you tasted was that fur-rubbing against your teeth but nobody told you if that was supposed to stay, or how long 'staying' was even meant to be before it turned into something else again.

And the thing in the graveyard mud…

Well. It didn’t spit open sideways yet.

But the taste of wrong dripped down from where it sat hunched over too hard like that rusty hinge nobody remembered how it should look unbent and now all you got was that greasy grey bloom on top and maybe if you held your tongue just right against your teeth, you could almost taste what a dead moose should be after somebody forgot how long 'should' even meant to go before it spilled over sideways and tasted like chewing on the echo of what might’ve been gnawed out enough to know what colour things were supposed to be swallowed and coughed back up but nobody bothered to bury deep enough for the rest to keep still quiet.

It didn’t spit open.

But…

Something broke.

Like trying to unbend a hinge that was made of silence instead of metal, so you never knew which way it was supposed to swing unless somebody told you what ‘trying’ even tasted like when all your tongue ever got was bone splinters and a greasy grey bloom on top and maybe if you held it just right against your teeth, you could almost taste the fur rubbing against them instead of whatever else was there, but nobody told you how long 'staying' was supposed to go before spitting back up again.

Something broke…

And inside that ‘trying’ got a little less empty.

A little louder than bone splinters scraping on each other when they shouldn't have gotten so goddamn close in the first place, like trying to lick an echo of toast-and-jam where somebody forgot they ate breakfast and figured maybe if you kept chewing on what was supposed to be crumbs instead of remembering how much better they tasted when still chewed up whole, eventually it’d grow back inside and taste better the second time around, but all that came out was this greasy grey bloom on your tongue and maybe if you held it just right against your teeth, you could almost taste the fur rubbing against them instead of whatever else was there, but nobody told you how long a memory should last before spitting up its insides.

Something broke…

And inside the trying…

A little more colour bled in.

Not like paint on canvas or blood on cobblestones after somebody got choked down too far sideways. More like remembering what it felt like to lick your teeth clean when nobody ever told you how long 'clean' should last before a rusty old hinge started making the taste of forgetting back into your throat again, and maybe if you held your tongue just right against them and squeezed your eyes real tight so the fur-rubbing taste didn’t claw its way up again, maybe that wasn't even supposed to be 'clean,' just whatever went down good enough for now but nobody bothered remembering how much longer it should have stayed swallowed before somebody else shoved another hinge in sideways too and forgot what ‘trying’ tasted like anyway.

A little more colour…

And a little sharper.

Sharper than bone splinters scraping on each other when they shouldn’t have gotten so goddamn close in the first place, sharper than trying to lick an echo of toast-and-jam where somebody forgot they ate breakfast and figured maybe if you kept chewing on what was supposed to be crumbs instead of remembering how much better they tasted when still chewed up whole, eventually it’d grow back inside and taste better the second time around, but all that came out was this greasy grey bloom on your tongue and maybe if you held it just right against your teeth, you could almost taste the fur rubbing against them instead of whatever else was there, but nobody told you how long a memory should last before spitting up its insides.

And it started to drip.

Loot & Achievements

• Item Gained: Moonstone Shard dripping sorrow
• Item Gained: Wet Rose Petals (x13)
• Skill Unlocked: Pontificate About Fog (Rank II)
• Quest Complete: Drive Off Banshee with Horny Unicorn Husband
• Achievement: Yelled at Goat for Uselessness (Again)
• Achievement: Did Not Admit to Hunger Despite Growling Stomach
• Obtained: One (1) cursed cliff-side lighthouse with attached graveyard, one (1) bucket of vaguely sentient fish guts.
• Learned Skill: "Resisting the Urge to Scream into Existential Dread" (Skill Level 1 - Amateur).
• Achievement Unlocked: "It Smells Like Sorrow Again!"
• Item Discovered: One (1) slightly used silk scarf, stained with salt and despair.
• Item Gained: Pocketful of Banshee Tears (consumable - imbues temporary psionic amplification, side effects include existential dread and uncontrollable sobbing).
• Skill Acquired: Master of Melodrama (passive - increased resistance to emotional manipulation, but prone to dramatic pronouncements in times of stress).
• Achievement Unlocked: "We Survived Another Apocalypse... Probably" (Bronze)
• Hidden Perk Activated: "The Comfort of Chaos" (grants temporary invulnerability when within three feet of BoomFuzzy during moments of extreme psychological duress).

• Moral of the Story: In a world gone mad, love, stew, and a healthy dose of dramatic flair are your best defenses. Always save room for dessert... especially if it's bubbling ominously. Fog is never gone. Neither is BoomFuzzy’s horn. Never trust a lighthouse that smells like old wounds. 

Quaraun and BoomFuzzy

• On writing a Trans main character and the use of deadnames & old pronouns

The Pink Necromancer, Moon Elf silk weaver & merchant: Quaraun on Noodle Beach. His master chef Phooka turned Lich husband: BoomFuzzy with his 1968 VW Bus Beach Noodle Food Truck. And their on again/off again mad scientist Sheep Demon lover: GhoulSpawn with his 1974 AMC Gremlin time machine. Time Travel setting swings back and forth between 40th century Maine after a comet hit the moon decimating the planet, and the 1970s, Maine. Quaraun in the main character, he and BoomFuzzy are a married gay couple. GhoulSpawn is their shared live-in lover. Art by Wendy Christine Allen.

BoomFuzzy

Quaraun

GhoulSpawn and BoomFuzzy

GhoulSpawn

GhoulSpawn and Quaraun

Faeries vs Elves (In The Quaraun Series) A Pink Necromancer World Lore Post

The Pink Necromancer: The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane aka The Twighlight Manor Series

🌸🦄🌸 Furry Yaoi Fiction about Elves and Faeries and Satyrs and Demons and Unicorns and Technomancer Wizards and Liches living in a Lighthouse and surviving as Travelling Merchants and Food Truck Chefs in Cyberpunk Dystopian 40th Century Maine, and Zombie Apocalypse and Time Travel but it’s Slice of Life Vignettes of Mundane Daily Lives of The UnSeelie Court’s Royal Family trying to survive after a comet hit the moon and turned the Earth into a CyberPunk Ice-Age. 🌸🦄🌸

• eBook Editions from this series can be found on: GumRoad

• Kindle, eBook, Print Paperback, & full colour illustrated Hardcover Editions from this series can be found on: Amazon

Meet The Characters

Books By Wendy Christine Allen
Currently Available on Amazon Kindle:

Index of the Quaraun novels, novellas, & short story collections on Amazon

And GumRoad:

Index of the Quaraun short stories on GumRoad

On Medium:

An Index of the more than TWO THOUSAND Quaraun Short Stories on Medium

(NOTE: a $5 or $15 per month paid subscription required to access stories on Medium)

On Vocal:

Index of the Quaraun short stories on Vocal

On Notd:

Index of the Quaraun Short Stories on Notd

On OnlyFans:

Index of the Quaraun Short Stories on OnlyFans

(NOTE: a $4.99 per month paid subscription required to access stories on OnlyFans)

Pink Necromancer Merch: On CafePress:

An Index of the Quaraun Merch on CafePress

Pink Necromancer Merch: On Zazzle:

Index of the Quaraun Merch on Zazzle

Not Quaraun:

This page was written by Wendy Christine Allen of 146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine.

All Rights Reserved.