Mlleghoul

The potpourri of a keepsakes box, dried flowers, brittle bouquets and boutonnieres, precious posies pressed between the pages of diaries and photo albums, sachets tucked among stored remnants and relics, and tokens of remembrance and reverence. Decaying roses in a dusty vanitas painting, blooms dried to powder, musky and musty, ghostly and haunting, sweet and acrid, baby-soft musk, rendered in pressed petals. The grief equal to the love, the tokens never equal to the weight they carry, entirely evidenced upon opening the box and releasing what's tucked within.

The sleazy, dangerous-divine charm of an Anne Rice mummy. Bandages steeped in sullen honey, infused with bitter, bracing cardamom and burnished amber incense, the aromatic pique of peppercorns tucked in various orifices and cavities for an afterlife eternity. Smoky, intimate burial, earthly fortune pressed to pulse points, swaddling of intimate opulence for eventual resurrection, rapture, and ruin. The transcendent high of choosing violence, (inviting carnage / welcoming chaos / accepting inevitable devastation / choose your own adventure here) and yet... you would not kick it out of bed for eating crackers. Which is a phrase I thought of because this smells a little biscuity, too.

John Willie fetish illustration. Chained boots, exaggerated heels, high-contrast drama. Patchouli leading, dark earthy command, resinous weight. Cedar following, clean wood, crisp structure. Musk as polished leather bands, warm metal on skin, restraint as ornamentation. Patchouli's opacity directing cedar's transparency, composed control, intimate tension. Incense smoke chain links, insubstantial, immersive; a binding emblematic and allusive. Elegant constraint, sophisticated dominance, a study in control and compliance, rendered in resin and wood.

Cor Serpentis is pallid astral berries translated through the cellular mimicry of a creature from beyond the stars, who's only ever known the pale juice of celery. Gellid minerals, wibbly, rocky aspic. Acid rain-forest-ozone melting, morphing, form in flux, clouds with limbs, bark and branch lightning-struck, caustic drip. Lavinia Whateley as Virgil Finlay-starlady, but in a story wholly her own. Weirdness made manifest independent of limited human frameworks and someone else's stunted stories. Invoking a wriggling, writhing Yog-Sothoth on her own terms, a ruin of her own making, an undoing of her own feeble design.

Frozen smoke, ghost trails, crystallized vapor, memory of fire. Cedar's bare branches, skeletal wood, stripped trees, winter forests. Lemon peel frozen mid-curl, preserved brightness, acid blade on ice, bone-white, moonlit. Amber trapped sap frilled and shivery-bitter, colorless, and pale. Glacial cold, silver sheen, mirror surface, morning rime coating everything. Muted, hushed, dulled edges, sound absorbed by snow. Edmund Dulac's Snow Queen on her icy throne, layers of ice and shadow, laminated, frigid, still. Remote majesty, solemn dignity, the ceremony and sorrow of ceaseless winter.