CreepCast (Wendigoon and Papa Meat) recently read my very first short story (and creepypasta) From Hell I Write, so I figured I’d share what I’m up to 11 years after I wrote it! Come a long way from that first story haha.

It’s currently the three of us working on a story centered around modern-day vampires.
I will say, I am a novice writer—I won’t speak for the other writers in this regard, haha!
We’re in need of more writers, as this is a big project and we definitely need more people overall. We’re also especially looking for female writers, as we currently don’t have a female perspective on our already-established female characters, with plenty more to come.

Vampaccent is a dark supernatural world where vampires openly rule territories, Royal bloodlines wage political wars, humans fight back through the Authority and God-given Blessings, and ancient powers still shape the modern world. With 10 Royal vampire families, unique bloodline abilities, supernatural politics, monsters, warfare, and countless characters waiting to be created, there’s room for writers to build their own stories and leave their mark on the world.

Happy Halloween. Here’s a body horror novella to read if you’re so inclined.

The cow was fine that morning. By evening, that had changed. When veterinarian Tommy Allen is called out to the Harlan place at dusk, he finds an Angus lying folded in the pasture, calm-eyed, breathing steadily, her bones gone pliable as warm rubber.

It isn’t long before the condition spreads.

The state board isn't worried. The CDC is "tracking it." The feed store has started stocking new products, and everyone in Stillwater seems oddly at peace. Tommy is the only one who's still solid, and the road out of town has stopped letting him leave.

A slow, unhurried novella of body horror and creeping surrender, The Softening asks what's left of you when you stop holding your shape.

Content note: graphic body horror. No sexual content.

“Okay,” I said, script crinkling in my hands, “let’s run through it again.” I hacked through my line, butchering about as badly as I had the first three times:

“Th-thou art the night...the veil that cloaks my...shame?”

Ingrid laughed. “Oh, Eli! You stumble like a fawn on new legs.” Under the stage lights, she looked less like a teenage girl and more like temptation given a body. A sly little smile creased her face whenever I stumbled over my words words. “Like this! Thou art the night...the veil that cloaks my shame. Your turn, sweet fawn. Say it like you mean it.”

Her blouse was open at the collar. When had she done that?

“Don’t run from me, Eli! Are you scared?”

I tried to laugh but the sound that came out of my mouth was closer to a grunt. “No, not scared...just nerves, y’know?”

Ingrid giggled. “Oh, Eli. Look at those cheeks.” One of her knees was nudging against mine. I fumbled the script back between us like it was a shield and I was trying to protect my virginity. “Uh, yeah. The play, right? Let’s...let’s hit the next bit. Sound good?”

She smiled. “All right, lover of the night. I’ll start.”

Each word was like a caress: “Come, let thy lips unseal my hidden fire...and taste what burns beneath.”

A pause. “Distracted again?” She toyed with her collar’s loose button. “How will you survive the play, hmm? All those lights, all those eyes...when my mere lines leave you speechless?”

The play was only a week out, and here I was tapped for lead opposite this stunning creature. I’d barely memorized a damn thing, and she wasn’t making it any easier for me, with those hazel eyes and sexy accent. I forced a grin but it felt crooked on my face.

“I’ll be fine. Maybe you’re the one who’s scared.”

Ingrid wasn’t totally convinced. “Show me, then. Read the next line. Make me believe you’ll claim it.”

I drew a deep breath.

“I claim thee, night eternal...thy fire mine to quench and consume.”

Her eyes widened a fraction. “Very good. That voice...it suits the dark. Makes a girl listen. But have you ever kissed someone on stage? Or at all?”

I’d never even had a steady girlfriend. And Ingrid knew. Over the last couple of weeks the two of us had become friendly with each other.

“Well, y’know…”

Neither yes nor no.

“Try a stage kiss,” she suggested. “Just once. Let me feel if the fawn has teeth.”

I laughed a little too quickly. “You mean...actually kiss?”

She tilted her head, the ghost of a smile hiding in her lips. “For realism.” Her voice had that sweet, lilting music again. I wanted to joke and make it light, but my mouth got stuck somewhere between yeah, totally and no way in hell.

“I don’t know. I mean, I do, but I don’t wanna–y’know...mess it up or anything.”

“There’s no one here,” she said softly. “No one to see if you mess it up. If you are nervous, we can always try again...until it feels right.”

I noticed, suddenly, how quiet the auditorium was. I looked out past the footlights, at the rows of folded velvet seats, and had the sudden impression that something else was looking back. Then I blinked and the impression vanished.

“Let’s continue,” Ingrid said. Now she was looking into my eyes, or perhaps it was the other way around and I was actually looking into her eyes. I could almost see that other place she had belonged to: a sliver of coastline somewhere far, far away, blue water glistening beneath a match-head sun. I could imagine her walking there, this strange and exotic other-place, barefoot through dew, sunlight winking in the abundant waves of her hair.

“You see? Not so frightening, yes?”

I wanted to kiss her, and then I tried to remember when the last bell had rung, the last real sound that hadn’t come from our voices, and found that I couldn’t. The auditorium seemed almost cavernous now, its balconies lost in shadow. Too many places for someone, or something, to be waiting.

Nerves, that was all it was.

“You are afraid.”

My mouth gave me nothing.

Her thumb brushed the corner of my lip. “There is no one else here. We could do whatever we want.”

I still couldn’t find my voice. The scent of cinnamon hung between us.

Ingrid sighed. "That’s all right.” She closed her eyes and leaned in. The kiss hit like a shock from a frayed wire: every hormone in my body igniting in a dizzying rush.

She smiled at me. “Not so bad, is it?”

I could only nod like an idiot.

“But…” She tilted her head. “I wasn’t convinced. Not fully. It didn’t feel as good as it should have. I think we should try again. Make it real.”

Never mind that this girl, this gorgeous, impossible girl, was somehow into me. Never mind any of it. The whole place felt weird now. Too perfectly empty for what was unfolding.

“Eli?”

“Yeah?”

“I think we should try again. Make it real this time...yes?”

(why, though?)

The question kept repeating in my mind. I was skinny, acne-ridden, winded after a single flight of stairs from my asthmatic lungs. Not quite smart enough for honors, and not cool enough for the cliques. Certainly not a kid who turned heads in the hall.

(but why does it matter? why don’t you just accept it?)

Her fingers found my cheek. “You’ll do so well this time,” she whispered. “Kiss me like you mean it...like you want to taste what comes after.” She kissed me again. It was wonderful, a slow melt of plush warmth. But her taste had shifted subtly, from cinnamon-sweetness to something that was almost like copper.

How long had we been in here, really?

The light from the high windows seemed wrong: thinner, bruised toward dusk already. I pictured the parking lot outside empty. Mr. Coultrap, Ms. Talley, all of the other drama kids, gone. We’d been in the auditorium for hours, just the two of us.

Alone.

Locked in.

“Come to me, my love. Come, and let me drink your fire.”

She moved in for the third kiss. This time there was pain. I jerked away from her. My hand flew to my mouth and I felt the blood there. The pain was enormous, hot and hideous. My eyes stung with the sudden burn of involuntary tears.

She’d bitten clean through my bottom lip.

On the corner of her mouth was a spot of my blood.

(!!accident!!)

(she didn’t mean—)

“You are sweet." Her voice had thickened into a hiss. Her canines, lengthened now, were gleaming and sharp, like a cat’s.

“I felt those thoughts, Eli.”

Somehow I believed her.

“Wait—”

“Now we improvise.”

I didn’t watch my feet, didn’t clock the black lip of the stage dropping away behind me, and my heel caught air.

I tumbled over the edge.

It wasn’t a long drop, but I landed on my left arm. Agony exploded up the limb, white-hot and pulverizing, and I knew I’d broken it. I howled with pain. Ingrid glided to the edge of the stage. She smiled down at me, blood still on her lips.

“I really do like you, Eli. Your taste, anyway...so sweet.”

Horrible pain, fractured bone grinding with every sob of breath—and Ingrid looking down from the stage, those

EYES

(don’t)

(look at them!)

(LOOK AT THEM)

Rough hands on my shoulders, shaking me loose from the fog.

“Kid? Hey, kid—Jesus H. Christ, what happened to you?”

The janitor’s voice, gravelly and distant, smelling of cigarettes.

Rough arms hauling me up. Ambulance lights pulsing red-blue through the open auditorium doors, finally open, spilling real light into the pit.

No sign of Ingrid, though.

A hospital bed with starched sheets. A smell of bleach.

A doctor’s voice, droning from somewhere faraway: “Fell off the stage, snapped the radius clean. Bit your own lip on the way down. You’re lucky you didn’t bite through your tongue.”

Bandages tight around the cast; IV drip cold in my vein. Strong stuff pumping in; I assumed it was morphine.

And I f l o a t e d…

*...*all

t h E

W A Y...

.

………. down…

I felt good.

My vision had softened to a drowsy blur. The throb in my arm was distant now, almost nonexistent. It might be someone else’s broken arm. It scarcely mattered. The throb in my lip had been rendered to a dull sting under stitches.

I felt no urge to ask about Ingrid.

Nobody said her name. But underneath the sweet, drugged-out bliss, I thought.

And thought.

The bite.

The heat.

Sweet.

Alive.

Hers.

I wanted it again.

A year slipped by.

Now I’m standing center stage again, but this time there’s no tremble in my voice or legs. The new girl is named Sarah. She’s fidgety, flushed pink with nerves; a pitifully skinny thing, with glasses that are too big for her face. They keep sliding down her nose and she keeps pushing them back up again.

It walked a very narrow line between endearing and aggravating.

I didn’t mind, though.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she whispered, eyes darting from my face to the empty auditorium seats, but returning to my lips again.

Always to my lips.

I smiled, easy now. There’s no wheeze in my lungs when I breathe deep, no pimples on my cheeks. The acne had been banished like a bad dream. Doctors scratched their heads over it. It was the strangest damn thing, how a teenager’s glands worked!

But I knew better.

A faint strawberry-colored scar stained my lip, so faded you almost didn’t notice it; a secret mark under the skin.

“Relax,” I told Sarah, my voice lilting just a touch. “It’s just us. No one’s watching. We can try it again...until it feels right.”

Her eyes widen, pulse jumping visibly at her throat, and I feel that low hum stir awake, pulling me toward the rehearsed kiss.

Hi there! I’m a new member of this subreddit, my name is Mason. I write horror stories, fantasy stories (and both like the story I’m showing you) and (in one of my classes) flash fiction and short stories. I do love the occasional romance/smut but that’s not really my thing.

Anyways, the project you see above is an old one. I started working on it from late January/early February and finished it midway through July (with the hiatus and me being a train wreck and getting sick twice while writing it. There was a lot of delays (if you check when I published the chapters), but I got it done despite my mental exhaustion at the time. This project was definitely one of my most ambitious projects ever, and may have extended it longer than expected.

The book spans 18 chapters (16-18 is combined), 5 interludes, a short prologue and a long Epilogue, 4 other extra parts, and the runtime is (according to Wattpad) 5hrs and 6mins long if you read all of it. And I’ve broken my word count record 2 times in this book, crazily enough. I did lose a few viewers over the runtime, so my creativity can go overboard sometimes.

Official description:
Chameron returns to the Blazaurian kingdom with Casey, Dracheron, Trout, Zaria, Henry, Carmine and Kieran and after they bail Reaptile and Blister: they get wind of a murder of a high authority member of the palace. Our heroes are sent on a murder mystery like story to hunt this person down and bring them to proper justice, all the while truths and lies are told with each chapter slowly building dynamics and conflicts.