No Darkness Today

Posted on May 18, 2022 by Sonya Lano — Leave a comment

This week, the darkness is on haitus. You get a lucky escape. And rather than a book review, you get pictures of Prague from my walk home from my swing dance class. Because occasionally I’m in a social mood–only, since I’m an introvert, no one’s around me, so I wander around and take pictures of things I find beautiful and mystical.

Here is graffiti. It’s supposed to be letters. It makes me think of a girl from a fairy tale in a hooded black cloak. Maybe she isn’t all that good. Maybe she’s casting a future of black snow. Her name is Zofia.

This gated plot shields a hidden magical academy that existed long before Harry Potter, one where eating fairy apples locks you in iron-walled labyrinths 😀

The sunset kissed Prague. It was a sky for enchantments, utterly whimsical.

No one would kiss me. I’d turn you into a frog. Ribbit. And my friend DID out me as a wood sprite in her anonymous, tell-all memoir. (*cough* *“…a wood sprite, a creature of the fae, with… her tousled mop of untamed curly hair, and her playful tendency to run around her apartment in her [redacted]…”*)

The view in the park, taken seemingly as a reflection in glass. In truth, Prague is secretly a city of magic whose true side you cannot enter unless she digs her claws into you like she did Kafka. My heart has puncture wounds. Heartbeat after heartbeat bleeds wonder.

A goblin hole by the canal. Its entrance is caged, of course, so they don’t get out, and flowers fragrance the air above to cleanse it from the spells the creatures exhale with malicious words through the iron portcullis.

The caged creatures are in hiding today. Not much light gets in for the wicked when your hopes are already dim.

A tram going under the troll bridge, the spears of light stabbing outward to prevent any troll attacks.

Some parts of Prague have been colonized by demons. See the pallid bit of bloodless pate peeping above the window sill? The haze around this ruin bears powerful spells.

Right under this, of course, lies the ad spell to lure you in, to lure you to sleep so the goblins can drag you in. The ad reads: Heavenly slumber custom-made, ProSleep… All you dream about. [Guess where you go when you dream under this dilapidated tower? Imagine dark plums and stone walls…]

More graffiti tells us “Flowers have souls”. Guess who wants to eat those souls? Yup. Goblins. Or maybe Zofia, the cloaked girl painted on the wall with black snow fluttering from her fingertips. I think she was ensorceled there because she crossed a powerful witch.

View of the square near me, supposedly with tram wires crisscrossing the sky, but in truth, we dub this the electric web spanning Prague that electricutes feral gargoyles and harpies. Any time gargoyles or harpies dive off some neo-Gothic cathedral – ZZZZZZZing! – they fried. Yup.

People feel safe waiting for the tram with its powerful light flares that are calibrated to fend off the Night Things. No one is at all worried that the tram might have already been infiltrated and is currently driven by goblins ready to transport them to the tower of stone and poisonous plums.

The busses here cleave demons in two with their headlights which strike like axes. Unless they’re driven by demons. Although the bus driver is actually more likely your friendly neighborhood physics professor. (If he has tusks, they’re just part of the mask.)

I’m nearing home, comfortable that the streetlights with their magical light spears are keeping the forces of darkness at bay.

The town hall beckons like a castle promising safety…

Right around the corner from where I live, this poor sign was a victim in a battle between humans and trolls that must have played out before I arrived.

The town hall and its nimbus of magic. It is cast and held all day by the workers in the pub in the building where I live.

Finally home and safe–but am I? Zulejka’s got the look of an evil goblin eye…

She leaps up to make her claim on power…

Has she been taken by the goblins? I ask?

Nah. She reminds me that she eats minced goblin for breakfast.

We cool, right?

Yep.

All is well with the world again.

Y’all stay strong this week. And I still promise that darn blog post on how to topple a dystopia! And of course more book reviews (several are in the works!), though I’m having trouble finding truly dark books (aside from the horndog-hero ones like for realz?). And *cough cough* let’s pretend I’ve not kinda gone back to reading classics and non-fiction? Eep?

And if you’re still here and feel like you want more words from my dang mind, here’s my shamelessly copied weekly info for new Sonya addicts: feel free to join the newsletter I haven’t been writing (but intend to), join the patreon I’ve been seriously neglecting (but want to resume), or check out my books I don’t want anyone to buy (for realz cuz it’s my old writing and I’m like nooo, don’t read it…) before I unpublish even more (like I unpublished my dystopians).