Wizards**
Following inspiration from Luke Gearing and Store Brand Danger. Just write the fucking thing.
Mercy Lin Redd
Mercy Lin Redd was born to money. That was her first exposure to the rot at the core of the world. But rot stretches, reaches through all it touches. Fingers, tendrils, digging into exposed flesh and never letting go.
Mercy Lin Redd never finished high school, not even a GED. Her parents weren't sure what happened, and the psychologists and psychiatrists they paid small fortunes to weren't either. Sure, they had theories, diagnoses. Depression, autism, generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsive, bipolar, schizophrenia. Even one suggested psychopathy as the root cause, but Mercy Lin Redd's parents didn't like that one.
Mercy Lin Redd saw her parents for the last time when she was 17 years old. That was the day she walked into the forest behind their country home and disappeared. There was a manhunt, news stories, drones and dogs. But she was gone. Like she never was.
But Mercy Lin Redd wasn't gone. Not even a little bit. Mercy Lin Redd was the opposite of gone. She was everywhere.
All it took was an altar (the forest floor), a sacrifice (an unhoused man no one would miss), an athame (the hunting knife her dad once bragged about using to gut a grizzly), and time.
Oh, and to be deep enough in the forest that no one would hear the screams.
As the sacrifice lay rotting, Mercy Lin Redd's mind grew light. She flew, weightless, bodyless, on streamers of color buffeted by thermals. At last she was free. But there is always a come-down. Only the body she left was not the same. Fertilized by the sacrifice, she became the substrate, fed by roots into veins, cold fire coursing through the woman at the heart of the forest.
Now, if you have a question that needs an answer, bury a freshly dead thing and let it rot in Mercy Lin Redd's forest. Once desiccated and drained of nutrients, the answer will come to you in your dreams.
Tom Drum
Being sick all the time is exhausting. It saps your strength, physically and mentally. A body in revolt from the moment of birth. Never being able to trust or rely on one's own flesh, the meat-case around your mind.
A kid born with more luck might have at least had parents who could afford the doctors and specialists needed to understand what was wrong with Tom. But Tom was not born under lucky stars, and foster parents don't like kids with mystery illnesses. Kids with pale skin and purpley-green bruises. Kids with wracking coughs and bloodshot eyes. Kids whose hair falls out in clumps.
Despite all odds, and a body in revolt, Tom grew older. Every day fighting against inevitability. Tom hated his body, its weaknesses. A curse he never knew a life without. Trapped inside, the internet became a cell window. Prison bars no less real for their immateriality.
Eventually, Tom started making friends. He found people who hated the world as much as him. Forums, 4Chan, Something Rotten, and private chat rooms accessible only via Tor browser and personal invite. A pit digging deeper, ripe with foul scents of hatred.
He learned to hate anyone who didn't look like him. Bitches, blacks, immigrants, faggots and trannies. Tom had been treated as lesser, cast aside and unloved. He didn't deserve it. Not like all the gutter trash. They deserved it.
Tom had an idea. Some old site from the 90s. A ritual, diagrams, methods and an ingredient list. One man's trash can be another man's treasure. And all those undeserving little shits might serve a higher purpose.
Tom's frailty meant he had to be creative. Couldn't just grab some whore and throw her in a van. But the internet, knowing the right links, the right websites. Transfer some crypto and a slut would show up at his door.
Tom always got his dick sucked before he started cutting.
Tom is a re-made man now. Almost a full internal rework. New organs, new fluids. New limbs, a little mismatched, sure, but what's a little after-market tinkering when the results are so good?