Evoking The Lover, Dead & Strangely
Silvatiicus Riddle
Run thee in the charge of panthers
whose footsteps blaze sygils over
the vast, and bedraggled wood,
whose mournful cries stitch the cutting wind
with pallid prayer flags of curling fog
that pry the thin blue mouth of Selene,
whose dark beauty seizes Apollo, sends him
tumbling into a great and terrible sleep
beneath the winter waves.
Fly thee in the choir of night-birds
whose wingtips carve vile and wicked spells
from out the violet plumes of wine-dark air;
or, thus recite devilish hymns from the crooked eaves
with voices filled with moss and lichen, graveyard dirt,
calling back the dead through the ground
from root-bound womb, fungal sarcophagi,
the fertile and forgotten lands.
Sway thee in a clutch of apples,
burnished by fire, and born of a hangman’s tree,
whose snakeskin rind, beneath the Perseids, renders sour
blood-milk, reanimation materia, released
when cracked upon a gallows stone. Poured
like frayed ropes of lightning over the swollen tongue
of a moth-eaten lover, that you might once again dance,
wide-eyed, and robed in starfall, across the languid land.
“Evoking The Lover, Dead & Strangely“ © Silvatiicus Riddle. First published here in Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Hallowe’en, October 31, 2026
Silvatiicus Riddle, (He/They) is a Queer, Disabled, multi-dimensional being disguised as a Dark Fantasy/Speculative Fiction Writer & Poet. A seven-time Rhysling Award-nominee, he can usually be found haunting the bones of an old amusement park at the edge of New York City. His stories and poetry, which have appeared within the pages of Strange Horizons, Apex, Enchanted Living, Eternal Haunted Summer, Spectral Realms, and Creepy Podcast, among others, utilizes elements of the esoteric—such as magic, true-and-lived folklore, and world mythology, as a means to build a bridge between here and the Other; alchemizing entropy into a sort-of strange hope one curious tale at a time. His debut chapbook, “In Your Dreams”, was recently released on Substack, wherein he also plays curator to the newsletter, “The Goblin’s Reliquary”, which has been described as “a sanctuary dedicated to the re-enchantment of the world”. Peruse the odd curios of his collection at: http://linktr.ee/silvatiicusriddle
Author’s comments:
With this piece, I wanted to explore the ways in which one might reanimate their departed lover, when the love between you both is no longer enough to overcome the distance between this world and the other. It is then that I decided, in order to succeed in necromancy, one must circumvent the natural order of things—to become something beyond human; to dabble in undertakings that toe the line between saint and sorcerer; animal and alien; sacred and profane. And through a course of strange spells, one might be able to explore a fundamental question at the edge of where life ends and yet, continues on: what wouldn’t I do for the person I love most?
Lead pic: Christmas Eve at the Grave, Otto Hesselbom 1896.
End pic: Heathcliff Under the Tree, Fritz Eichenberg 1943
background to poem: Wyldravn.deviantart.com
Additional background: Starry Night by Jean-Francois Millet, 1850
Additional stock provided by Omnia
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