#darkfiction — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #darkfiction, aggregated by home.social.
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Looking at an old abandoned building and immediately wondering what happened there.
Then wondering what could still happen there.
#horror #horrorcommunity #readers #darkfiction #books #holidays #news #creepy #oldbuildings
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The police found seventeen photographs of me sleeping.
They asked who took them.
I recognized the bedroom.
I recognized the dates.
What I didn’t recognize was the child lying beside me.
In the last photo, I was gone.
He was wearing my face.
#horror #horrorcommunity #microfiction #readers #bookstodon #news #darkfiction
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The police found seventeen photographs of me sleeping.
They asked who took them.
I recognized the bedroom.
I recognized the dates.
What I didn’t recognize was the child lying beside me.
In the last photo, I was gone.
He was wearing my face.
#horror #horrorcommunity #microfiction #readers #bookstodon #news #darkfiction
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The police found seventeen photographs of me sleeping.
They asked who took them.
I recognized the bedroom.
I recognized the dates.
What I didn’t recognize was the child lying beside me.
In the last photo, I was gone.
He was wearing my face.
#horror #horrorcommunity #microfiction #readers #bookstodon #news #darkfiction
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The police found seventeen photographs of me sleeping.
They asked who took them.
I recognized the bedroom.
I recognized the dates.
What I didn’t recognize was the child lying beside me.
In the last photo, I was gone.
He was wearing my face.
#horror #horrorcommunity #microfiction #readers #bookstodon #news #darkfiction
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The police found seventeen photographs of me sleeping.
They asked who took them.
I recognized the bedroom.
I recognized the dates.
What I didn’t recognize was the child lying beside me.
In the last photo, I was gone.
He was wearing my face.
#horror #horrorcommunity #microfiction #readers #bookstodon #news #darkfiction
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🕯 There’s a different kind of darkness — the kind passed down, half-whispered, never fully explained.
Dark Descent is inviting folklore, myths, reflections, and dark artwork inspired by the uncanny. A place for stories that linger rather than shout.
📖 Share yours here:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/group/dark-descent-contributors/discussion#readingcommunity #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #darkfiction #folklore
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🕯 There’s a different kind of darkness — the kind passed down, half-whispered, never fully explained.
Dark Descent is inviting folklore, myths, reflections, and dark artwork inspired by the uncanny. A place for stories that linger rather than shout.
📖 Share yours here:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/group/dark-descent-contributors/discussion#readingcommunity #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #darkfiction #folklore
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🕯 There’s a different kind of darkness — the kind passed down, half-whispered, never fully explained.
Dark Descent is inviting folklore, myths, reflections, and dark artwork inspired by the uncanny. A place for stories that linger rather than shout.
📖 Share yours here:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/group/dark-descent-contributors/discussion#readingcommunity #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #darkfiction #folklore
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🕯 There’s a different kind of darkness — the kind passed down, half-whispered, never fully explained.
Dark Descent is inviting folklore, myths, reflections, and dark artwork inspired by the uncanny. A place for stories that linger rather than shout.
📖 Share yours here:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/group/dark-descent-contributors/discussion#readingcommunity #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #darkfiction #folklore
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🕯 There’s a different kind of darkness — the kind passed down, half-whispered, never fully explained.
Dark Descent is inviting folklore, myths, reflections, and dark artwork inspired by the uncanny. A place for stories that linger rather than shout.
📖 Share yours here:
https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/group/dark-descent-contributors/discussion#readingcommunity #horrorcommunity #writingcommunity #darkfiction #folklore
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My husband keeps asking why I lock the bedroom door at night.
I don’t have a husband.
This morning, I found our wedding video.
I watched myself walk down the aisle.
Halfway through, I started screaming.
Everyone kept smiling.
#horror #readers #microfiction #creepy #darkfiction #horrorcommunity #news #books
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My husband keeps asking why I lock the bedroom door at night.
I don’t have a husband.
This morning, I found our wedding video.
I watched myself walk down the aisle.
Halfway through, I started screaming.
Everyone kept smiling.
#horror #readers #microfiction #creepy #darkfiction #horrorcommunity #news #books
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My husband keeps asking why I lock the bedroom door at night.
I don’t have a husband.
This morning, I found our wedding video.
I watched myself walk down the aisle.
Halfway through, I started screaming.
Everyone kept smiling.
#horror #readers #microfiction #creepy #darkfiction #horrorcommunity #news #books
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My husband keeps asking why I lock the bedroom door at night.
I don’t have a husband.
This morning, I found our wedding video.
I watched myself walk down the aisle.
Halfway through, I started screaming.
Everyone kept smiling.
#horror #readers #microfiction #creepy #darkfiction #horrorcommunity #news #books
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My husband keeps asking why I lock the bedroom door at night.
I don’t have a husband.
This morning, I found our wedding video.
I watched myself walk down the aisle.
Halfway through, I started screaming.
Everyone kept smiling.
#horror #readers #microfiction #creepy #darkfiction #horrorcommunity #news #books
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One night ended her life, her boyfriend wants to rewrite the truth of her death—Tell Her Again- A Dark Psychological Thriller
Google Excerpt Elise is dead. Toby says they were attacked by strangers, and everyone believes him. Everyone except Elise’s brother, Owen. As he uncovers the truth behind Toby’s carefully crafted story, he realizes the most dangerous person wasn’t waiting in the dark—he was standing beside her all along. A dark psychological thriller about deception, manipulation, and the power of a convincing lie. For Mature Audiences Only. -
BRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven The Kind of People Who Stay
Daily writing prompt Who are you most inspired by? View all responsesBRECK: Stone’s Rest — Chapter Seven
The Kind of People Who Stay
This is Chapter 7 of BRECK: Stone’s Rest, Book Three of the BRECK series — a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye. New chapters post daily.
The Story So Far
Bren confirmed Frostpeak won’t see harvest. Breck stood at the edge of her failing terrace, let the Karithian valley all the way in for the first time in three years, and asked Mira to show him the rest of it. She said it was bad. He said he’d stood in worse rooms. Neither of them argued the point.
← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →
Chapter Seven: The Kind of People Who Stay
This chapter asks who inspires a man like Breck — and uses the answer to put him exactly where the series needs him to be.
Mira walked him the full length of Frostpeak’s eastern slope before dawn the next morning — every cracked support, every patch of failed light, every place where the stone had gone grey and cold in a way that clearly wasn’t seasonal. She didn’t narrate it. She simply walked and let him look, and he looked the way he always looked at damage, methodically and without sentiment, because sentiment was fine in the privacy of a terrace at dusk but evidence was what courts needed and evidence was what he was here to gather.
The concession began where a line of survey stakes drove into the ground at even intervals, pale-painted wood standing out sharp against the darker surrounding soil. Breck stopped at the first one, crouched, ran his thumb along the stake’s upper edge. Fresh paint, recently reset — the kind of detail that meant someone had walked this line in the last few weeks and confirmed it, which meant someone knew exactly where the legal boundary sat.
“The charter gives them rights to excavate within the designated survey perimeter,” Jenna said, from his left. She’d joined them at first light, quiet and prepared in a way that told him she’d been awake longer than they had. “Foundational stone only. Surface extraction on a separate writ they haven’t applied for and wouldn’t receive.”
“What did they actually do?”
“Come and see.”
The first breach was half a mile east of the survey line, which on open grassland was not a small distance and not an easy mistake to make. A deep-cut trench ran forty yards into ground that no legitimate reading of the charter touched, the soil around it turned back and dried in long pale furrows, and at its far end, still visible in the pale early light, a mobile pulley system of the kind Breck recognized from the Lumenvale guild foundries sat unattended, waiting for its shift to begin. Below the trench’s lip, cut into stone that should never have been cut, a dark smear ran the length of the exposed face where something had been extracted that hadn’t been coal or iron or any mineral he had a name for.
“What’s that?” He pointed at the smear.
“Heartstone,” Mira said. “It’s what the bioluminescence runs through. What the bond runs through. What we — and the mountains — have never permitted to be extracted, because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t take the vein it runs in.” She kept her voice flat and informative, the way a person keeps their voice when anger has been too many years in residence to function usefully as a feeling anymore and has simply become texture. “There is no provision in Garrow’s charter for heartstone extraction. There is no provision for it in any charter Lumenvale has ever issued, because until the concession came out here and found it, no surveyor had ever mapped this deep.”
Breck straightened, looked the length of the trench, looked back at the survey stakes a half mile behind them, and felt the clean, unambiguous click of a picture finishing assembling itself. He’d been trained for twenty years to distrust conclusions that arrived feeling like certainty, because certainty was what bad intelligence felt like too, from the inside. This wasn’t certainty. This was simply a trench, in the wrong place, containing the wrong material, next to a pulley that wasn’t owned by anyone who had permission to be there.
He stayed long enough to sketch the trench dimensions on the back of an old dispatch sheet from his satchel, noting the distance from the survey line, the visible vein damage, the equipment markings. He was halfway through the equipment markings when the shift crew arrived.
There were seven of them, ground-dwellers, coming up the trail from the main camp with the particular loose energy of men early into a long working day, voices low and carrying in the cold air. They pulled up short when they saw him, collectively, the way men do when unexpected company appears at a worksite and they haven’t decided yet whether to be annoyed or alarmed.
One of them — a young man, not yet twenty-five, with the same deep-cut forearms as every foundry worker Breck had ever known and a sun-weathered face that put him somewhere between apprentice and journeyman — stepped forward from the group with the specific posture of someone who’d decided, in the three seconds it had taken him to assess the situation, that the right move was to handle it himself before anyone else handled it worse.
“You’re on a private work site,” he said. Not aggressive. Just stating it, the way an honest man states a fact he actually believes in.
“I know,” Breck said. “I’m just leaving.” He finished the last of the equipment markings, folded the dispatch sheet back into his satchel, and straightened to his full height, which did its usual work on the young man’s posture without any other effort required. “You work this trench?”
The young man’s eyes moved to the trench, to the survey line in the distance, and back to Breck. He wasn’t stupid. Breck filed that immediately. “I work the site,” he said carefully.
“How long?”
A pause. “Three seasons.”
“Who brought you out here?”
And here the young man’s posture changed, fractionally, in a way Breck recognized — the particular straightening of someone who’s been asked something that makes them want to stand a little taller before answering it. “Garrow did. Hired me out of Westmere. I’d been loading grain carts for a copperweight a week and going nowhere in it.” He said it without apology, the way people state conditions they didn’t choose and didn’t stay in. “He came through, told us what the work was, what it paid, what it could become. There were forty men from Westmere who said yes inside a day. I’ve sent money home every week for three seasons and that wasn’t something I thought I’d be saying at my age.” He glanced at the trench again, and something in that glance told Breck the young man had looked at it before, in the same direction, and not entirely liked what he’d found when he did. “I don’t set the survey lines.”
“I know you don’t,” Breck said, and meant it. He held the young man’s eyes a moment longer — not as pressure, simply as confirmation that what he’d just said had been heard and weighed and found honest — then picked up his satchel and walked back toward the survey stakes with Jenna and Mira behind him.
He didn’t say anything until the trench was well behind them and the camp had dropped below the rise.
The question the prompt had been pressing at all morning finally finished arriving, the way questions did when they’d been working on him from underneath without announcing themselves. Who had actually inspired him, across twenty years of this work, to be the kind of man who crossed a line onto a private worksite and sketched the evidence before the shift arrived rather than staying on the legal side of the stakes and writing a report about what the stakes implied?
Not commanders. Not the men he’d served under in the signal corps, most of whom had been competent and a few of whom had been brilliant and none of whom had been, at the particular bone-deep level he meant, inspiring in the way the question was asking. Not the adjudicators he’d carried letters for, not the lawyers he’d watched work in Crestfall and Cold Harbor both, though he respected the ones who were good at the thing.
It was people like that young man, actually. Not because of what they’d done, but because of the look in a person’s eyes when they understood they were standing in a situation that had been created dishonestly and were slowly deciding what they were going to do about it. Breck had seen that look a hundred times, in couriers who delivered orders they’d been given no context to evaluate, in locals who’d watched magistrates they trusted turn out to be men they didn’t, in clerks who kept honest records in systems that weren’t designed to want honest records. People who’d been handed a condition they didn’t choose and were working out, quietly, alone, without fanfare, whether they had the spine to do the honest thing once they’d identified what it was.
He couldn’t save all of them. He’d learned that. He probably couldn’t save Frostpeak. He was starting to learn that too, and the learning was costing him something different this time than the valley had, which meant it was teaching him something different.
But he could be the kind of man who showed up with a dispatch sheet and a pencil, who counted the distance from the survey stakes to the trench and wrote it down, who asked the young worker honest questions and heard honest answers and left him standing in a better-defined version of whatever decision he was already arriving at on his own. He couldn’t be the inspiration. He was never going to be the inspiration — he was the wrong shape for it, too abrasive, too quiet, too consistently disinclined to deliver the kind of speech that sent men home with fire in their chests. What he could be, and what he had apparently been choosing to be for long enough now that it had stopped feeling like a choice, was the kind of person who stayed.
He could stay here.
He looked at Jenna as they crossed back through the survey stakes and she read his face the same way she’d been reading him since the threshold station, with professional precision and no wasted words.
“You’ll need lodging,” she said. “I know a platform on Thunderstep’s second terrace that isn’t being used.”
“That’ll do,” Breck said.
He was going to need more dispatch sheets.
← Chapter Six: What Success Never Meant | Chapter Eight →
BRECK: Stone’s Rest is a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye — Book Three of the BRECK series, crossing from Lumenvale into Nomados. Chapter 7 of 20. New chapters post daily.
✦ Enjoyed this chapter? “The Kind of People Who Stay” closes the first arc of Book Three — a courier who has never once been the inspiration, standing in front of evidence that can’t be argued away, deciding he’s staying anyway. Browse the full series, follow for daily chapters, or share this with a reader who’s always been quietly inspired by the people who just don’t leave.
#adventure #books #Breck #ChadwickRye #chapterSeven #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2800 #DarkFantasy #darkFiction #EpicFantasy #fantasy #FantasyFiction #fiction #Frostpeak #HighFantasy #inspiration #moralCourage #nobleDarkFantasy #serializedFantasy #serializedFiction #shortStory #StoneSRest #webFiction #writing -
Hey #readers, here's a free #shortstory for you
This will be for you if you like #DarkFiction, #Macabre #Fiction, or #CautionaryTales
#Booktoot #bookstodon #bookmastodon #bookish #books #bookrecommendations #booklovers #bookcommunity #readingcommunity #reading #book #bookblogger #bookblog
A Tale of Reflux, Red Flags, & a Hospital Retreat Gone Wrong | www.PhysiciansWeekly.com https://share.google/C3usKRKRqJcsotMUC
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Shaving: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction
Nigel couldn’t believe his beard had gotten this long.
It was down to his chest, tangled and frizzy. It was black, but almost brown at its feathery edges. He could hear his father yelling at him to trim it, his high, almost husky voice echoing in his head. His father was ex military. He loved the clean shaven look and forced Nigel to follow that hairless motif, even though Nigel hadn’t picked up a weapon until the Drum started. Now, he always had one with him. The ravaged green world demanded it, even with the Drum destroyed and the Unnamed no longer hunting him at night.
Nigel wondered if his father was still alive in the nursing home in Saint Louis Park. He had barely been alive before the Drum. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be spared.
Nigel had been lucky to hide in his Golden Valley home for most of the apocalypse. He had left for a few weeks to join survivors fighting an Unnamed by a lake that kept attacking them. It had been a hard fought battle. Only Nigel and a few others survived. None of them had the appetite for further confrontations with the Unnamed, and they all retreated to their former hiding spots. Those had been the last people he’d spoken to, except for a band of soldiers passing through who told him the Drum was destroyed, and the Unnamed were nonviolent unless attacked.
Nigel felt his dark, reflectionless face. His features were gaunt, weathered by a lack of nutritious food. His cheeks were flat, his nose large, his forehead dry. His lips were cracked and bloody in places. The weather had been fine. It was the fear eroding his flesh. The constant worry of the Unnamed returning, or a crazed Reanimated storming through the neighborhood.
Slowly, above his white bathroom sink, he began to trim his beard. There was no electricity for his razor, so he resorted to a pair of orange handled scissors he kept in his office for trimming documents. They were sharp, but loud as they crushed the fibers between its blades. In minutes, most of his beard was reduced to a prickly edge beneath his fingers. He sighed.
“I guess it’s time. They said it was safe.”
Ahead of him hung a wool blanket, yellow and brown, duct taped to the wall in miscellaneous streaks of silver adhesive. It dangled just above the sink.
It blocked the mirror.
He’d put it up during the first week, when he noticed the shadows watching him. Now, with the Drum destroyed, survivors passing through told him mirrors and reflections were back to normal. They no longer held phantoms.
He slowly reached for the fabric, then stopped.
“I can’t do it.”
He walked out of the bathroom with a shrug.
“I can’t believe it’s okay.”
I really enjoy writing about these quieter moments in the Greenland Diaries, where characters are learning to live again after a horrifying ordeal that shook the foundations of humanity. These bits of flash fiction give me ample opportunity for it. You can learn more about the mainline series right here. Thank you for reading!
#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #teraryHorror #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing
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I Can’t Leave: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction
Rob had memorized the pattern of abandoned cars in the parking lot outside the building. A red van, a blue truck, a few white sedans, silent and sun faded, lay scattered across the velvet sheet of greenery in the basin around the office tower he’d been hiding in. He’d been fixing a boiler in the basement when the Drum began. Most of the building was empty that first night. Everyone had already left for the day. Only a handful were torn apart beneath the Unnamed’s obscene claws.
And then the office was empty.
Except for Rob.
He had always imagined himself different at the end of the world. At six foot five, all elbows and height, with an unkempt beard dropping to his chest and a perpetually worn Minnesota Twins cap, he’d figured he’d look the part. He had thought of himself as stereotypically male, chew, flannels, and a quiet, lumbering confidence. But when the monsters arrived and stalked the hallways, he learned quickly how fragile that image was. Back on his grandfather’s farm, he and his friends in their local anti government militia had joked that if the world ever collapsed, they’d be ready.
But once the Unnamed descended and began mutilating and resurrecting their victims, the only thing Rob grew adept at was hiding.
For someone so tall and broad, sneaking through the office should have been impossible, yet he’d shaped himself to its shadows. He learned to bend beneath desks, wedge between bookshelves, flatten against cubicles. Even when the Reanimated drifted through, he found ways to slip past them, though other survivors told him not to fear them. Those survivors were nothing like him. They weren’t afraid of the shadows. They fought them day and night. He’d heard their skirmishes echoing through the Drum. Even now, with it finally over, the night outside carried only wind, insects, and the soft groan of the building settling.
How were they so brave?
A few survivors had passed through recently and told him he could go home, or even find work with the Reestablishment. But he couldn’t force himself to leave the gray block of the office. Every time he packed his few supplies, slung the rifle he’d taken off a dead soldier, and started toward home, he barely made it a few blocks. A shadow, a rattle of debris, a shift in the wind, anything could spook him, and he’d sprint back to the familiar corners of the office floor.
Day or night didn’t matter.
He just couldn’t leave.
Thank you for reading my flash fiction from the Greenland Diaries. In this story, I wanted to show a character you might expect to be strong because of how they postured their identity, but when the apocalypse appeared they realized it was all an image without integrity. They weren’t actually built for the conflict they thought they were seeking. Monsters are an excellent mirror.
#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #literaryHorror #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing
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👁️ The abyss isn’t empty—it’s waiting.
Ethereal Nightmares: 37 stories to haunt your nights.
Perfect for gifting or a midnight binge.
🕯️ Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DTFQN5DZ
💀 Dark Holme: https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/category/ethereal-nightmares
#HorrorBooks #ChristmasGift #BookRecommendation #DarkFiction #EtherealNightmares -
👁️✨ What if your reflection didn’t follow you through the mirror?
JB Wocoski’s The Rat in the Mirror is a trap wrapped in shadow—one of over 100 microhorror stories in Dark Descent: Whispers From Beyond 2025.
🪞💀 Read it here:
Amazon – https://amzn.eu/d/0wNo5kj
Dark Holme – https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/category/dark-descent-whispers-from-beyond-anthologies#microfiction #bookstodon #horrorcommunity #darkfiction #readingcommunity #gothicliterature
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How far would you go to forget?
Behind one unmarked door, Raven waits—wrapped in lace, steeped in danger. 🖤
Her story is just one of 100+ in Dark Descent: Whispers from Beyond. 📖🩸📕 Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0wNo5kj
📕 Dark Holme: https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/category/dark-descent-whispers-from-beyond-anthologies
Join the dark side… we have cookies.
www.darkholmepublishing.ukEver walked into a place and instantly knew you shouldn’t be there?
#bookstodon #readingcommunity #darkfiction #gothicliterature #horrorstories #indieauthor
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How far would you go to forget?
Behind one unmarked door, Raven waits—wrapped in lace, steeped in danger. 🖤
Her story is just one of 100+ in Dark Descent: Whispers from Beyond. 📖🩸📕 Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0wNo5kj
📕 Dark Holme: https://www.darkholmepublishing.uk/category/dark-descent-whispers-from-beyond-anthologies
Join the dark side… we have cookies.
www.darkholmepublishing.ukEver walked into a place and instantly knew you shouldn’t be there?
#bookstodon #readingcommunity #darkfiction #gothicliterature #horrorstories #indieauthor