the_scent_of_lilacs | Commentfic Monenday

Commentfic Monenday

Commentfic Monenday! Comment with a prompt as many times as you'd like. Respond to another's prompt as many times as you'd like. Dracula / Nosferatu focus.

And PLEASE post a prompt for other writers! :)

Commentfic is a type of fanfiction prevalent on journaling sites, such as LiveJournal or DreamWidth. The term derives from the fact that the fanfiction is written and then posted in the comment field of a journal entry.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

any, any/any, let the rain sing you a lullaby

This one really spoke to me, E - so just posted my short fic separately, inspired by your prompt!

Nosferatu, Orlock, Ghosts take shape under moonlight, materialize in dreams. Shadows.

Nosferatu 2024: Orlok - In the caverns of the soul, darkness reigns.

Edited 2025-05-12 19:18 (UTC)

Had he ever been light of heart. Gentle in nature. At ease with the world populated around him.

He had not. His nature had been difficult from his very beginnings. Conceived by force. The shaping of his spine within his dam an electrifying of his nerve ends. Perhaps his mother had been doubled over as though dealt a blow. Then the parasitic growth, the rhythmic pumping of her blood through his threadlike veins, into the cavern of his foetal skull, snyapses firing, will germinating in the roots of his molars.
Finally, that gasping moment when he was forced into the world, caught in the ancient gnarled hands of a midwife crone who perhaps saw what he would become. She had crossed herself and dropped the babe and caught him up by one ankle, leaving his hip sore for all his existence, yanked as he was from the stone floor where surely his brains would have been bashed. Only he and the crone knew of this moment that passed between them.

She had sought him out when he turned thirteen. Sending a message that he attend her dying bedside. All staggering height and black locks curling around his face, he lowered himself to his knees, inside the tiny room. The man inside the boy formidable in the long bones of his arms. She took his hand and inscribed something invisible into his palm. And he felt the sigil skitter through his marrow and lodge inside his heart, nestled into one of the chambers and causing him to thump a fist again and again against his breastbone. The woman nodded, closed her eyes, and left her corporeal form. The next night he visited her graveside and asked what she had done. The freshly turned earth beckoned him to lie down but he resisted and left the next day for war, acting page until one night unlit by the new moon he drove his captain’s sword up beneath his ribs while the man was bent over the wash basin. He’d had enough of obedience.

Had he wed, fathered children? Begat and begat. He was certain he had, but the aeons drifted through him like a mist that hangs heavy in the wooded forest, and he had lost his way back to the memories of his life. There wasn’t enough light by which to follow a path of any kind. Darkness was the world he inhabited. Sunlight a thing to be feared the way the child fears the nighttime. He was the darkness, he mused, not asleep but suspended in a dreamlike stasis, his thoughts like bats on the wing, darting and shrieking and landing upside down wrapped in leathery wings awaiting the dreaded sunlight’s dying.

He was the darkness. He is the darkness. He is the thing that makes the nighttime filled with fear and horror.