Just like in previous entries about the nastier members of Faerie, all I knew about the Redcap came from a picture by Brian Froud on a single page of his book Fairies.
I’ve learned more since then, but most of it is still motivated by the media interpretation (by creators who only saw that page as well) But I’ll try to make due and have an image of two of them in their native habitat. Haunting a ruined castle in the highlands of Scotland.
The day started so nicely. I had had my breakfast doing one of my “mock commutes” to Starbucks and back and had done my day’s Inktober challenge while I was there. Other than getting a little slowed down by my computer’s personality I thought things were beginning to go okay.
And then I heard A loud thud. When I looked up there was a large hole in my window surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks. I wasted a couple of being in shock wondering if someone had it in for me. Finally I went downstairs to see if there was any evidence I could asses. I was too late to see anyone running away and while there are plenty of rocks lying around there didn’t seem to be enough with the right heft to do hat kind of damage.
I called my building manager who said he’d get somebody to tape it up and to call the cops for paperwork’s sake. Because this was definitely not an emergency I was on hold for nine minutes. (being told if it wasn’t an emergency I could hang up and try again every thirty seconds) I finally got contact with a real person who took my information and said I had the option of getting a cop to look at it if I believed the damage was more than five hundred dollars. I said that it was but I wasn’t completely sure if I was telling the truth or not.
About an hour later the building manager showed up, and with one look assured me that I wasn’t lying about the more than five hundred thing. He contacted the handyman since it wasn’t just the hole in the wall that was the problem but that the way the window was cracked that it could hypothetically collapse with shards fall on people bellow.
About a half hour later I finally got a call from the police to tell me that they were running late and I should keep waiting.
Soon after handyman showed up to put plastic over the window. And then the Police finally showed up to have a look at it and give me an incident number freeing me from my wait. The frustrating thing is even with the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed I’m still going to have to waste more time with this tommorow when the contractors show up to replace the glass.
On top of this I don’t think there’s any evidence that dismisses my “a bird had an accident” hypothesis.
For my own personal reasons, Zombies/Revenants fall into the category of things I refuse to take seriously anymore. Literally everything has done with the “modern zombie” to the point for me the only way to go is parody (a fanfic with Reg Shoe showing up in Walking Dead is an idea I’m trying very hard to scrub from my mind)
While I’d like to go back to some of the traditional folklore but I don’t know enough about the European traditions regarding revenants for one of these challenges, and as for “real” zombies… Well not getting into an argument about political correctness, there’s really no way to explain how a picture of sleepwalking blacks doing menial chores isn’t what it looks like.
to maintain some variety in my diet I’m trying to do more recipes. I’ve also been wanting to do a good meat pie for a while and I’d been shopping around for a descent recipe. Most of the suggestions I’d bee getting came from my favorite cooking blogs, Inn at the Crossroads which reverse engineers meals mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire along with it’s accompanying cookbook, A Feast of Ice and Fire. Most of the more medieval recipes were sweeter than I was looking for but I finally found one I liked very loosely based on the pork pies Lord Manderly serves to the Boltons and the Freys in revenge against the Red Wedding. It is heavily implied in the book (and later confirmed by George R.R. Martin) That the main ingredient was three murdered members of house Frey.
The blog’s version of the recipe substitutes Frey with Pork.
Beyond prep taking longer than I predicted, and a comedy of errors with some spilled gravy making a lot of smoke so I spent an hour trying not to break my apartment’s fire alarm, I think it came out pretty well. (though I might have rushed the roux a little too much so the gravy wasn’t quite as thick as it should have been.
So the Inktober Magic Tupperware told me to draw Igor, something I had some mixed feelings about. It’s not that I don’t like Igor, I love the concept of Igor that I’ve done a few versions of him in the past. It’s just that he’s one of those horror tropes that’s been so overdone that it’s impossible to take it seriously. These days my image of Igor is three parts Marty Feldman and seven parts Terry Pratchett. Based on this I figured if I had to do him I had to give the poor guy a break and a cup of coffee.
Todays Inktober challenge ran a little late due to a weird and rushed morning. So here we have today’s entry, the most terrifying of the Scottish Faerie folk, the Nuckelavee.
For the longest time all I knew about the Nuckelavee was from a single page from Fairies by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. All it said was it was a skinless giant that haunted the coast of orkney. This was accompanied by a terrifying picture of it’s skinless arm reaching for a cliche victorian flower fairy.
I later learned it was also part horse like a centaur except the human bit was merged with the horse where a rider usually sits . I find myself imagining it the personification of a nighttime storm crashing against the coastline. The thought of one of these things running you down on a beach would be the stuff of nightmares.
