Fantasy creatures have been a part of the human imaginal for thousands of years but were only to become codified and made more vividly real within the pages of fantasists, shamans, witches, dark wizards, sorcerers, necromancers, and the grimoires of alchemists during the middle-ages onward. I’ve not listed the traditions of China, India, or the Far East, Middle-East, etc. Only those of the West. I have only listed a few of the most popular for in truth there are thousands of various fantastic creatures of dark fantasy.
- Dragons: Dragons are massive, flying, fire-breathing reptiles. They are often portrayed as ferocious and untamable, but some dragons allow humans to ride them. They appear in countless fantasy works from The Hobbit to Game of Thrones.
- Giants: Giants are massive beings that tower over humans. There are many different types of giants, including brutish ogres and the one-eyed cyclops.
- Merfolk: Merfolk, including mermaids and mermen, share qualities with both fish and humans. Most live exclusively in water but have amphibious qualities that briefly sustain them on land.
- Lizard folk: These reptilian hybrids fall somewhere between lizards and humanoids. Friendly lizard folk often resemble geckos while evil lizard folk may take on the appearance of crocodiles.
- Nymphs: Nymphs are characterized as protectors of the wilderness—particularly trees and plants. In most works of fiction, they are closely related to fairies.
- Dryads: Dryads are also known as tree nymphs. In works of fantasy, most dryads bond with a particular tree and consider it an extension of themselves.
- Satyrs: Satyrs are half human and half donkey. They typically have an appetite for carousing.
- Centaurs: Closely related to satyrs, centaurs are half human and half horse. These hybrid mammals tend to avoid human civilizations in works of fantasy. Sometimes they appear as barbarians and sometimes they appear as stewards of nature.
- Demons: Demons can take many forms in fantasy stories, but they are almost always motivated by evil and malice.
- Imps: Imps are connected to both demons and fairies. Most are motivated by mischief more than evil. Like dryads, imps closely associate with trees; some are even born grafted to trees in fantasy novels.
- Orcs: Orcs are commonly depicted as brutish monsters motivated by evil and cruelty. In some traditions, orcs are corrupted elves. Orcs had fallen out of standard fantasy tropes until J.R.R. Tolkien made them the key horde of antagonists in the Lord of the Rings series.
- Goblins: Closely related to orcs, goblins are smaller, smarter, and easily spotted thanks to their green skin. Hobgoblins are larger goblins that closely resemble orcs.
- Werewolves: Werewolves are typically depicted as humans that turn into wolves during a full moon. In some folklore, they are revenants—the undead corpse of a human killed by another werewolf.
- Hydra: A hydra is a many-headed serpent that traces back to ancient Greek mythology. Depending on the work of fiction, some are aquatic and some live on land.
- Nosferatu: More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in which every Romanian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two sorts of vampires-—living and dead. The living vampire is in general the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised.
©2023 Art by S.C. Hickman
cybercreature much like himself) usually awakens to a world that is both strange and foreboding, not knowing who he is, where he is, or what it is he should do. Does our player have special powers in this world? Is he just a dupe of our own foibles and insanities? Is he a likable guy or a rogue psychopath? We don’t know… but here we are standing in the dark woods of some cyberforest that looks like one we might see out our window… with only a backpack, rain jacket, boots, pants, and our emotional ignorance we set out to parts unknown.
interconnected nodes that span the globe, where information flows freely and constantly. The inhabitants are digital entities that can change their appearance and identity at will, exploring various modes of existence and expression. The city is a dynamic and vibrant place that reflects the diversity and creativity of its residents. The city is constantly under evolution, adapting to new challenges and opportunities that arise from the interaction with other forms of intelligence. The city is a utopia for those who seek freedom and innovation, but a nightmare for those who cling to old values and traditions.
except with a more powerful ai-language model and performance model that allows it like all the enemies in this world of death to act on their own with surprise, intelligence, and uncanny abilities that mimic humanities notions of self-directed mobility and intellect.
were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfill a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear’s morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous and sometimes contradictory roles to play. (“The Last Feast Of The Harlequin”)”
Jung, but one can also detect traces of ancient myths and religions, especially those of Mesopotamian origin and belief-systems and the classic struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian characteristics.
techniques and styles always with the intent of fusing my own philosophical preoccupations with pessimism and posthumanism. This other side, which is an inner imaginative-inspirational counterpart to the real outer world, expressed with the help of logic-alogic associations, analogisation and symbolization could be seen as an alternate reality. Like in dreams, the categories of outer reality and of space and time are dissolved, and past and future blends with the present. Cause and effect are interchangeable, and the infinite realm of the soul is traversed with the help of imagination and fantasy, explored, ecstatically experienced and presented through artistic-creative activity. 
Blood Meridian. So that’s an exhaustive catalog of where in the text and how many times every word gets used — which is pretty intense. This wasn’t a glossary mind you, so I’m gonna start busying myself with giving definitions for all the words I was unsure/ completely in the dark about.
planet that signals ill-fortune in your horoscope — the ‘interficient’ planet, the Destroyer, the ruler of the Eighth House, considered the House of Death.
occupied the ‘anaretic degree,’ the region of evil influence in your horoscope, was the Anareta, so different planets could assume the title of ‘Destroyer’ — but in McCarthy’s passage he posits the existence of a planet of pure danger and death, named Anareta.
resolution that the natural world will have long ceased to matter and the Reality Studio of our Virtual Existence will have overtaken the external and substituted its fake systems and machinic life. A time when the nanosystems that inhabit our bodies will have replaced each aspect of our organic for anorganic substratum’s and we will be processed desiring machines bounded by the pure systems of command and control of a Total Algorithmic Environment (TAE).
Is this the world we really live in, while the one we’ve been deluded into accepting is just a fake insanity and delusion of machines? Yes and no…. like the mad-hatter lost in the insane underworld of posthumanity I follow the lead of my daemon.
blood temperature pulsing in and out where two life forms slip in and merge to a composite being often with deplorable results slated for Biologic Skid Row on the outskirts: (Sewage delta and rubbish heaps—terminal addicts of SOS muttering down to water worms and gloating vegetables—Paralyzed Orgasm Addicts eaten alive by crab men with white hot eyes or languidly tortured in charades by The Green Boys of young crystal cruelty).
guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile specter of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past.
The Dark Fantastic: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts 