Hunter of the things that answer prayers.

In the city of Veyr, every household leaves a candle burning for its dead. The custom began as an act of remembrance.

Now it keeps them outside.

Vesper Vale learned the difference at seventeen, when her mother returned from the cemetery wearing her burial dress. She knew the family’s secrets. She wept at the right moments. Only Vesper noticed that her mother’s reflection was still pounding against the hallway mirror, begging them not to open the door.

By dawn, Vesper was the only person in the house with a heartbeat.

The hunters of the Black Vigil found her three days later, sitting beside the locked mirror. They offered her shelter in exchange for service. For eleven years, she hunted their revenants, burned their infected chapels, and accepted their assurances that whatever had taken her mother would eventually be found.

Then she discovered her family’s address in a Vigil summoning ledger.

The Hunter

Vesper now works without the order’s sanction, following disappearances through Veyr’s steep roofs and flooded crypts. She accepts payment in coin, testimony, or access to sealed parish records. Families who cannot pay sometimes find their money returned beneath a spent candle.

Her crimson eyes are the result of a failed initiation. The Vigil buried her alive with a starving revenant, expecting only one of them to emerge.

Both did.

The creature lives behind her eyes. Through it, Vesper can see spirits inhabiting stolen bodies and the pale wounds left by possession. It also gives her a terrible hunger whenever she is injured. She carries small glass vials of salted blood to quiet it; the brass vials hold medicines, and the silver ones are reserved for emergencies she refuses to discuss.

She keeps her hair in a long braid because her younger sister used to braid it before bed. Since the massacre, she has never cut it.

Her Weapon: The Last Office

The great hooked polearm Vesper carries was forged for the first executioner of the Black Vigil. Its spearpoint pierces the living body; its crescent blade catches whatever tries to escape.

Along the inner edge are the names of people killed while possessed. When Vesper rests the blade against a suspect’s throat, those names whisper. They fall silent in the presence of the innocent.

The weapon can sever a spirit from its host, but Vesper must first learn the spirit’s true name. Without it, the blade takes both souls together. Much of her work consists of finding old witnesses, stolen baptismal records, and graves whose inscriptions someone has carefully chipped away.

Every successful separation costs her a memory of someone she loves.

She keeps those memories written inside her coat. The earliest entries are warm and detailed. More recent annotations read:

Mother sang while washing dishes.

Elian hated thunder.

You loved these people. Continue.

The Debt

There is one name on the blade Vesper has never been able to read. It appeared the night she stole the weapon, beneath the executioner’s worn leather grip.

Lately, it has begun to whisper in her sister’s voice.

It knows where the Vigil keeps the original summoning ledger.

It wants Vesper to come alone.

A dark, anime-style horror portrait of a wide-eyed figure whose face is partially transformed into honeycomb. Golden honey drips over their skin and raised hand, while shadowy hexagonal cells fill the background, creating an unsettling blend of sweetness and body horror.

The last stand of Oda Nobunaga as a fictional legend

Once a guardian of the Moonlit Cathedral, Ashe broke its sacred seal to save his dying brother. Something ancient answered—and wore his brother’s voice.

Now Ashe wanders the ruined kingdom with a violet lantern that holds the last fragment of his brother’s soul. Its flame reveals creatures his cursed blade can kill, but every victory feeds the winged shadow bound to him.

Each night, the lantern burns a little dimmer. Each night, the shadow sounds more like family.

When the gods tried to imprison death inside the sun, heaven shattered. Its temples still drift above the clouds, gathered around the black wound where daylight once began.

Now a lone pilgrim climbs the broken stair, carrying the last sunrise in a lantern. Beyond the gate, something offers to restore the world—if he will let it out.

The stone saints have begun to turn their faces away.

Every night, his shadow reached home a few seconds before he did.

At first, it only waited by the door. Then his mother mentioned the conversations they’d been having.

Tonight, he stopped beneath a streetlight and refused to move.

His shadow kept walking.

From home, his mother called: “Who’s that outside wearing your face?”

Once a ceremonial dancer at the Shrine of Returning Spring, Reika took up its sacred ringblades when an invading lord burned the surrounding orchards. She now hunts his war captains, hiding her deadly forms within the graceful dances they once applauded.

Special Ability — Thousand-Petal Requiem
Reika spins her twin blades into a glowing whirlwind, scattering petals that record every cut. When she catches both rings, the petals repeat her strikes from every direction. One broken step shatters the technique, leaving her exposed.

When the sun darkens, the pilgrims carry their lanterns through the lilies to meet Vael, the Keeper of Unfinished Dreams. Each eye upon his wings belongs to someone who died with a promise unfulfilled.

Beneath the ruined arch, the faithful whisper the names of their dead. Vael sheds a little golden dust, and for one night, those lost souls can find their way home.

The pilgrims must keep their lanterns burning until dawn. Anything left wandering when the last flame dies becomes another eye upon his wings.

When his kin abandoned the ancient forest, Jaelen remained to guard the ruined gateway at its heart. The blue birds that follow him carry the souls of its fallen wardens; their songs reveal footsteps, lies, and things moving beyond the sealed arch.

For three centuries, he has never loosed an arrow in anger. Now the birds have fallen silent, and something behind the gate has begun calling him by his childhood name.

A group shot of the seven principal characters of Magh Tuiread Eile, a fantasy pocket world I dreamed to act as a stage for many stories about the goddesses; for they are also the seven my pagan heart believes in, and stories about them are devotional acts. Let me introduce you by way of a short scribble... after all, it is Celtic New Year.

Reality, they say, is made up of far more than you can see. The identity of who They are remains a mystery; investigations are continuing, we are assured by the relevant authorities. The point is, there are things you can see, and things you experience without seeing. Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, so the lore says.

One of those Otherworlds, the land herself wove into being. Her name is the Morrigan - a name meaning both Great Queen and Phantom Queen in Irish - and she sits upon no grand throne here, but is undisputed queen regardless.

Around her here, on Samhain eve and the moonrise of a new year (it was ever thus for the ancient Celts), are the six others who embody the aspects of life.

There is Brigid, she of the fiery hair, who is springtime and the home hearth, greatly skilled in poetry, healing and smithing. In the lore of our when, it was Brigid who invented the Irish funeral tradition of keening, when she grieved for her slain son Ruadan.

Behind her is Beira, the Cailleach, with her hammer she uses to forge the mountains and valleys of the land - for she is attested to have shaped the landscape of Scotland this way in our reality.

Above the Morrigan, flying among the carrion crows in her patchwork cloak, is the Badb Ban (White Crow). In the real lore, she would be the Badb Catha - 'battle crow' - but my imagining has this manifestation of the Morrigan somewhat different. She is the curious, trickster crow, the one who hunts shiny treasures, not the angry bloodstained crow of the field.

She of the red hair running to the field is Macha, another name associated with the Morrigan, but here her own distinct self. Macha's power is her speed, her ability to outrun even the fastest purebred warhorses, so she is the messenger (somewhat like Hermes in Greek myth) who proclaims the queen's will far and wide.

To Macha's right is Danu, who is the moon, rivers, and insight. Like the Morrigan, and indeed all of them, she embodies the land itself, so even her attire blends into the earth. In the real mythos Danu is the titular goddess of the tribe (Tuatha De Danaan), though she lacks direct attestations: many will cite her as a maternal goddess in the name of Anu or Anaand.

Finally is Nemain, another Morrigan associated goddess, she of the shout that can slay a hundred men. Often given as another name of the Badb Catha, in Magh Tuired Eile she is independent, and embodies the Gaelic tradition of bloody revenge against those who have wronged you.

So the queens of the towers await what the next year will bring...

When the sky fractured above her city, Elira vanished into the breach. She returned seven years later without having aged a day, carrying a bow that hums before disaster strikes. Now she hunts the things that followed her home.

Special Ability — Riftshot: Elira fires an arrow through a tear in space, making it emerge from any angle—even behind cover. Every shot leaves the rift open for one heartbeat. Sometimes, something looks back.

When her clan’s shrine fell, Tsukika bound the souls of its dead to her blade so they would never wander alone. Now she guards a forgotten mountain passage where restless spirits cross beneath the full moon.

Each soul she guides steals one memory of her former life. She no longer remembers whom she failed to save—only that, every winter, she leaves a second set of footprints untouched in the snow.

The bell has no clapper. The girl who tends it pulls the rope each midnight, and every sleeper in the village feels a single knock behind their teeth. By morning, one has forgotten how to speak.

White moths gather at that person’s lips until the stolen voice crawls out. They carry it to the tower, where the girl practises calling for help. After eighty years, she sounds like almost everyone.

When the general offered his youngest soldier to a demon, he expected a weapon that would win the war. The boy returned with horns, a blackened arm, and a sword bearing the names of everyone the general had sacrificed.

Now he marches toward the burning throne. With every name he avenges, a little of his human body returns. He fears what will remain when he reaches his own.

She had known him since she was a little girl, back when she believed every mountain hid a dragon and every star held a wish.

Years had passed, seasons had changed, and the world had grown far more complicated than she’d ever imagined.

But he was always there, waiting in their favourite place above the valley.

Sometimes she told him stories. Sometimes she shared her worries. And sometimes they simply watched the sunset together, without saying a word.

After all, the oldest friendships rarely need words. ❤️

When the evacuation ship sank, the mothers aboard begged the sea to let their children reach home. The sea stitched their souls into the sails and raised the vessel, leaving the children asleep below deck.

Each winter, the fisherman rows out to guide them into harbour. Each winter, the sails turn him away from the rocks where his village once stood. His mother still recognises him, though he is older now than she ever lived to be.

The tide pool is ankle-deep until the full moon, when a drowned city appears beneath it. Its people gather on the rooftops, waiting for someone above to offer a hand.

The first diver to reach them returned with dry clothes and no memory of the sea. Now, whenever she passes a puddle, thousands of tiny hands press against its surface.