The Ruins

The path takes you to a great hill overlooking the boglands. Mossy ruins jut from the earth, with all manner of nook and cranny to shelter in. Nevertheless, a particular set of ruins draws your interest. Stained glass lanterns hang from an ancient tower of cylopean stone, and a great wooden door lay intact before it.

Beyond the threshold lay a vestibule with signs of habitation. Tools and coats hang from walls, and beyond that, a living space has been made in the old tower. Dozens of rugs blanket the cold, stone floor and a comfortable velvet couch provides room to lounge before an ever-burning fireplace. Strange paintings dot the walls, and collections of ephemera are scattered throughout.

Among the ephemera, you see...

About The Thing Which Lives Amid the Ruins

I am Ciara (she/her; name is pronounced /ˈkɪərə/). I am a medical research technician in her early 20’s. I am a cloven-hoofed creature of ill omen. I am favored by grazing hedonists. I am fond of bacteria.

I made this site because I don't use or want to use social media, but still enjoy the idea of the internet. I am not much good with coding, but hoping to learn a bit more html, css, and js along this journey. You can probably tell the setup leans close to tutorial templates, but I hope some heart shows through regardless. I really like having a space to just put stuff online and especially love being able to have a place to link to other people's things!

I plan to post more of my creative work here in time. I am a writer, with most of my focus on fantasy/weird fiction and tabletop RPG stuff. Right now, I'm working on a novel called To Silence Locusts. It's about Henarda, a religiously deranged milkmaid who offers herself up as a sacrifice to the mechanical plague beneath her village. It's some sort of queer gothic fantasy/weird fiction type thing. I doubt I'll produce anything capable of being traditionally published and don't really have market-chasing ambitions so it may end up here. If you happen to be interested in it or beta reading, feel free to leave a comment. It'll be quite a while before I finish up the draft and revise it enough to want to send it out for beta reads though :)

Odd Traits

• I enjoy the sensation of being pricked with needles.
• I do not enjoy the sensation of eating meat.
• Mostly, animals just frighten me.
• I struggle with watching any sort of audiovisual media. I prefer books because I can imagine what things look like and linger in moments that particularly affect me.
• I am an avid listener of my local college radio station.
• I wear long dresses most of the time. I find them extremely comfortable, flattering, and easy to layer warm things on. Most of my dresses are black but I am hoping to branch out into jewel tones in the year 2025.
• When I bleed I like to take a sample and look at it under my microscope.
• Irony makes me feel tired.
• Bacteria and archaea are some of my favorite things in the world. I have a special interest in them that tempers just about every aspect of how I view the world.
• At time of writing, I believe there is still hope. I hope you do too, wanderer of the web. Soft breezes may draw the path of an arrow an inch from the neck.

Things I Favor

Food

• Tofu Fried Rice
• Saag Paneer
• Sourdough Bread
• Roasted Potatoes (skin on!!!)
• Broccoli Stir Fry
• Lavender Ice Cream
• Pumpkin Pie
• Fresh Cream 

Books

• The Phantom Tollbooth - Read as a child; permanently altered my sensibilities. Educational and whimsical. It still influences my work now.
• Frankenstein - Got me into gothic literature while being one of the highlights. 
• Carmilla - Ending makes me feel a lot of strange ways. I keep writing about it unintentionally.
• Wuthering Heights - AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
• Jane Eyre - AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
• Táin Bó Cúailnge - Dense and old Irish epic; tied in with Tuatha de mythology and the like. Never read mythology as a kid because I thought it was sacrilege. Glad the Ulster Cycle was my first real dive in; it's so awesome. The Kinsella translation goes particularly hard.
• Gormenghast - Beautiful prose, dense and unafraid. Comedy of manners, strange dead rituals, whimsical worlds and terrible, insanely-named people. 
• Invisible Cities - Read as a teen, showed me just how good literature can be. Brisk, wondrous read. 
• The Dispossessed - Science fiction with a actual themes and interesting characters. Remarkable linguistic worldbuilding. Portrait of a strange anarchist utopia. Love it. 
• Piranesi - Lonely otherworld of infinite halls, coral-filled vestibules, and strange marble statues. A desolate and whimsically pretty story that appeals exactly to my sensibilities. Title is a reference to Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose Imaginary Prisons series I also love.

Video Games

• Dwarf Fortress - Found this as a child and it altered my neurology.
• Minecraft - One of the first games I ever got really into. Started playing back in the Beta days, when zombies still dropped feathers. Very dear to me. I love its desolate, haunted world so very much. Sculk is trustworthy.
• Yume Nikki - Beautiful dreamscapes. Early experience with weirder games, still one of the highlights. 
• Caves of Qud - Layercake history retrofuturist science fantasy ASCII RPG. You can play as weird mutants and even if you don’t you still become a horrific abomination of flesh and chrome by the endgame. 
• TES 3: Morrowind - My favorite of the Elder Scrolls. Dark, dense world that actually feels interesting to explore. Storyline actually makes me feel things. Totality of the experience makes me feel lost and at home all at once. Could talk about it forever. 
• Dark Souls (FromSoft’s dark fantasy stuff in general really.) - Dark worlds that [usually] don’t explain themselves overmuch. 
• Disco Elysium - One of the very best CRPGs; very best games of all time really. 
• Night in the Woods - Wonderful narrative game set in a dying town in Pennsylvania.
• In Other Waters - Speculative biology focused game. Interesting narrative, has actual molecular/microbiological things going on unlike most zoology-focused spec evo… Also has an actual thematic throughline and emotional core.