“Katalepsis” 1.1

This review was fast lane commissioned by @skaianDestiny.


I think I've heard of this in passing? Maybe? Well, it's a web novel, its title is Greek for "comprehension," and its tagline is "A web serial of cosmic horror, urban fantasy, and making friends with strange people." Which...sounds like an awful lot of other web serials to be honest, but it's got three chapters commissioned (so far) to hopefully impress me with.

It also has some nifty banner art:

Kinda makes me wish it was a comic, honestly. I'd enjoy a webcomic drawn in that style. Well, anyway, Arc One is called "mind; correlating." Interesting title. I could probably quote the entire text like I did with the Lovecraft stories, since this is a free web story, but I'm not sure if the author would appreciate that. So, I'll just drop a link and quote key passages like I've done with other prose.

Let's start.


...and, for key passages to quote, well. This is one hell of an opening line:

“On the day I met Raine, the first thing I did was jerk awake in bed and vomit nightmares into my lap.”

Vomit nightmares? I'm not sure how to envision that, exactly, but it's definitely evocative.

The following paragraph clarifies that it's not literal nightmares being regurgitated, but rather nightmare-induced nausea. The protagonist WISHES they could purge nightmares that easily, but unfortunately not. All last night, their sleep was tormented by the Eye beaming unwanted knowledge into their brain. Serves you right for attempting human transmutation, protag. This has been happening with increasing frequency lately, and their health has taken a nosedive because of it. By this morning, their room is stinking of sweat and bile, and...oof, they have a bad nosebleed too. Hopefully just a sinus issue and not a literal brain haemorrhage from overexposure to the Eye.

They try to recite some poetry to themself to distract from their physical and mental anguish, but it doesn't work. Slowly, defeatedly, they realize that it might be time to admit defeat and go back on the schizophrenia pills. This weeks-long relapse has been worse than anything previously experienced.

“It was time to call my mother and go back on the crazy pills.

’Crazy’ is a safety blanket word for me. It defines a neat boundary in which I can exist without screaming at the walls or talking to people who aren’t there. A safe zone to keep me from being locked in a padded cell. I don’t like ‘insane’ because the word itself requires a ‘sane’ with which to define against. Crazy has no opposite.”

Interesting way of looking at it. And...sort of hinting at the fact that there might not really be anything "wrong" with our protagonist, since there's no right to contrast their state against. Still, it does seem like they need to build up their will save bonus a little if the Eye is going to keep challenging them to dreamscape staring contests.

So, they get out of bed and go through what's become a daily routine over the past couple of weeks since the relapse started of washing all their sheets and blankets, mopping the floor as best they can, and washing the blood and mucus out of their face. No shower, unfortunately. It's a tiny, one-room apartment. And fuck, they have classes this morning.

As they try to wash their room and their body up as best they can, a spidery, eyeless humanoid watches them from behind the bathroom door, a jellyfish-like creature floats past them making whale noises, and a cat-sized insect sniffs at their foot until they kick it away. When they get themself the instant coffee that they've been surviving on, there's a big shaggy porcupine type thing in the cupboard that they try to ignore.

...I'm guessing this is sort of like "From Beyond." Earth has a whole second biosphere of creatures that are normally invisible and intangible to us. There was also a Stargate episode that made interesting use of this premise.

Anyway, I'm hoping that that's what this is. I always liked that concept, and I'd probably enjoy seeing it explored in a longer work like this one that has the space to go full speculative evolution and detail the exotic biosphere. Our maybe-not-actually-schizophrenic hero may become eldritch David Attenborough! Or eldritch Steve Erwin. Given their penchant for taking bodily harm from their experiences, maybe eldritch Coyote Peterson. In any case, I'm here for it.

After three cups of instant coffee, they decide that they're going to need actual food before they can muster the willpower to tell their mother they need the pills again. Also, they don't have any food in their dorm room, so they'll need to brave the outdoors to go shopping. Also also, they are a she. Named Heather. Heather Attenborough Erwin-Peterson Mason.

There's another very illustrative passage as she gets ready to go outside:

“I kept up the one-woman pep talk to coax myself into real clothes, dragged a thick jumper over my head, found an almost-clean pair of jeans and pulled my coat around my shoulders. I loved that coat, thick and padded like armour to keep the world out. It was the most expensive thing I owned after my laptop.”

Mood.

As she drags herself out the door in her protective coat, Heather is trying to acknowledge the reality that her parents were right. She can never be normal. She can never make it through college, if just two months' worth of freshman English Lit courses are causing her enough stress to trigger a full relapse. Her description makes it easy to judge her parents for this, but from their perspective they might really be doing the best they can to shield their daughter from unnecessary pain and disappointment. Rightly or wrongly.

The intro scene ends with Heather informing us, seemingly from a future perspective, that she's not actually incapable of dealing with higher education. She's also not crazy, even if sometimes the realities she has to deal with make her wish she was. Thank you for the disclaimer, Future Heather. I kind of figured out the second part already, but knowing the first does make the tone of the story a little more optimistic than this intro suggests.

Additionally, she gives her full name as "Heather Lavinia Morell." Lavinia, eh? I see we're not being subtle with our inspirations. Not that I'm in any position to judge.

She leaves her apartment, and braves the short walk to campus. I guess she's not in the dorms, then. That's...simultaneously better and worse than the alternative, for someone like her. Mostly worse, I think. Outside, there are a ton more creatures for her to narrate the behaviour of in a lilting, melodic English-accented monologue. There's a big polyp-thing scrounging around on the pavement, a bunch of worms crawling all over one of the trees, a pack of faceless skeleton-birds watching her pass by from one of the nearby lawns (do they know she can see them?), and even that skyscraper monster from Stephen King's "The Mist" stepping over the campus, its torso blotting out the sky overhead. She can hear the big boi's booming footsteps, apparently, but it doesn't seem to be impacting the Earth's surface that we interact with, so I guess her ears are tuned into Beyond just like her eyes are. Or...wait, we already knew that, the jellyfish was making whale noises, derp. Anyway, it's very early in the morning, so there's hardly any human foot traffic besides her. Ah, that explains why the skeleton-birds are watching her and not someone else, okay then.

As she walks passed the wildlife, she tells us a little about the town of Sharrowford. Hip college town in the north of England. The modern town is built around a much older stone village, though, and the site is not a place that people like herself really should be hanging around near. Presumably, either because it attracts creatures less harmless than the ones we've seen so far, or because it just gives off Tillinghast radiation and sends her senses into distracting hyperactivity. There's also the Eye of Truth thing that's been tormenting her dreams, so that also might be geographically linked to this place rather than Heather's brain.

She crosses the campus to a little strip mall behind it and finds an open café called the Aardvark that other students rarely patronize, which she considers to be a plus. I'm guessing she prefers loneliness to overstimulation, when she's already having to deal with so much sensory input. Unfortunately, there's a towering mass of writhing seaweed standing right in front of the door, and she's hesitant to walk through it to enter the Aardvark. However, she also sees a hot girl with a bewitching smile and a swanky leather jacket that looks great on her approaching the café. It's kinda gay.

“Not the sort of girl who’d ever be interested in me. I knew I was clutching at straws, so alone and exhausted that even a hint of sympathetic human contact had me ready to beg like a dog.

She forgot me, looked back at The Aardvark, ambled up to the door and went inside. I was about to turn around and start the long walk back to campus, to wait outside the canteen, because I couldn’t follow her in there now. What if she tried to talk to me? She’d work out I was crazy, I’d wither up and die under that smile. I could imagine the disgusted look on her face when she realised what I was.

But then the scribble monster jerked toward the café on flickering legs. It bent, folded itself at the waist like a contracting length of intestine, and pressed what passed for a face up against the glass. I fumed for a moment and then forced myself to step past it and into the cafe. I wasn’t about to be upstaged by my own subconscious. If one of my hallucinations could ogle a pretty girl I didn’t have the courage to speak with, then at least I could prove I wasn’t afraid.”

I doubt the seaweed creature was actually acting on any mental impulses from Heather, but she thinks that she's hallucinating it so that's a reasonable enough conclusion for her to come to. So, she passes the kelp beast, enters the Aardvark, and proceeds to order her breakfast while eyefucking Raine. I assume this is Raine, at least. It's more likely to be the girl's name than the seaweed monster's. Probably.

The eyefucking doesn't last more than a couple of minutes though, because Heather's sleep debt is crashing in on her now, and the smell of food is making her realize she was even more hungry than she thought. And, unfortunately, the combination of tiredness and hungriness starts sending her into a kind of fugue state that she refers to as "Slipping."

““No, not now, not now,” I hissed through my teeth, a familiar prayer when I felt a Slip rushing toward me. My heart pounded and I started to shake. I bit back a whine of fear and frustration. I was so tired, I was so tired, all I wanted to do was eat, please let me at least get some food in my belly before it happens. Not now, not after two weeks of hell, not ever again. Please.

Slip vertigo yanked me sideways. My vision fogged with a ghost of elsewhere overlaid on the cafe, dark and windswept and ashen. I skidded to my feet and banged my shin on the edge of the booth, then lurched for the toilet.

I slammed into a toilet stall in the cafe’s public lavatory just before another wave of vertigo rolled over me. Bracing my feet against the floor and my hands against the stall walls, I pushed and held on, I anchored myself as hard as I could and squeezed my eyes shut and whined and prayed under my breath. I could have done this in the booth and saved a few seconds, which might have made all the difference between staying here and Slipping over, but the pathetic thought in my head was that I couldn’t look like a crazy person in public, not in front of a pretty girl who’d smiled at me.

Bracing myself didn’t always work; maybe it didn’t work at all, maybe it was pure delusion. I’m supposed to have those. Delusions.

I smelled bone ash and the spice of chemical fire, heard howling wind, and felt the bite of alien air on my exposed skin. How’s that for a delusion?

My hands jerked, as if the walls weren’t there anymore.

Slipping.”

Sounds like we're passing "From Beyond" and starting to verge on "Dreams In the Witch House" territory. Good thing Heather is studying literature and not math, or things could start getting really ugly.

There's a knock on the bathroom door, and a voice asking if its occupant is okay. Obviously, it's Raine the seaweed monster. Or wait, no, it's Raine the hot girl. Or...rather, the hot girl who is probably Raine but we don't know yet. Precision! Hot girl is offering to hold Heather's hair back if she needs help throwing up. Either this girl is just really proactively altruistic, or she's kind of starved for friendship herself. Heather tells her that she's fine, she doesn't need help, mostly because she doesn't want QT3.14 to see her in this state. However, the noises she's making as she says this convince QT that she really isn't fine, so QT steps into the stall next to hers and looks over the wall between them.

The word choice here is brutal:

“She stepped into the next open stall, clambered up on the toilet, and peered down at me over the dividing wall. I yanked myself as upright as I could manage and stared back at her, feeling like a plague victim at the bottom of a pit.”

This doesn't hit my quite as hard as, eg, early Serial Experiments Lain did, but it still does hit me. During the time when my mental health was at its worst, and I had panic attacks semi-frequently, there were a few times that I had to hide from public sight while people I didn't know or only vaguely knew were around and...well, yeah. I wasn't bleeding and vomiting like Heather, but same principle, and this feels genuine to me.

Anyway. QT drops into Heather's stall over her objections, and helps get her nosebleed under control. On one hand, pushy, no sense of boundaries. On the other...she made the right call in this case, so maybe it's less pushiness and more just really good intuition.

Also, it turns out that QT has seen Heather enough times in the past to recognize her. Though I don't think the reverse is true at all, since Heather's attraction to her is sufficiently strong that I don't think she'd forget it.

“She held up her hands and flashed the same smile she’d given me outdoors, beaming endless confidence straight into my brain. That’s the only thing which stopped me running. “Hey, look, I’m not gonna bite, ‘less you ask me to. I saw you come in here and thought, ‘Heeeey, that girl looks a bit messed up, maybe she needs a hand, maybe she needs some help.’ And, yeah, you are a bit messed up, let’s be honest. If you don’t need help then I’m Ned Kelly. I’m not being catty or weird. Solidarity, you know? Gotta look out for each other.” She thumbed over her shoulder. “One of those guys out there coulda followed you in here instead, found you passed out on the toilet. Here, lemme help.”

I wiped at my nosebleed, then pinched it off, breathing through my mouth.

”I’m not—“

”You’re not hungover. I know, I can tell.”

” … how can you tell that?”

”Seen that sort of look in your eyes before. I don’t know what your deal is, but hey.”

She held out a hand.”

Definitely feels like QT might secretly know something about something, and recognize Heather's connection to it.

Also, QT names herself as Raine. The seaweed monster remains nameless, even if it probably would have been the better waifu option. Oh well, Raine is still okay I guess.

Raine mother hens over the recovering Heather, in a way that makes Heather wonder if she might be older than she looks. She just seems so *mature* and *adult* in all the ways that Heather is afraid she'll never get to be. Hmm. This is definitely an unreliable narrator at work, but I'm not yet sure how unreliable. She determines that Heather isn't hungover or on drugs, and guesses that she's having a really rough first trimester. Hmm. Maybe she doesn't actually know something about something, then? I guess she might be playing dumb. Heather, almost dying of humiliation, says that no, she's not pregnant, she's mentally ill and had been having a psychotic episode where she thought she was being sucked into another dimension where the Eye of God tries to teach her exotic physics but succeeds only at melting her brain one little piece at a time. As she speaks, she tells herself that this is ripping the bandaid off; better let Raine make her judgements now and get the probable pain over with quickly.

Hmm. Heather probably could have gotten away with just saying she has a "neurological disorder." Make it sound like more of an epilepsy thing than a psychosis thing; there's much less stigma attached to that. I guess I can't fault her for not having the presence of mind to think of that at the moment, though.

Not to mention that, as the text itself points out, Heather is about to admit defeat, drop out of college, and return home to her parents to exist in a medicated daze forevermore. In that context, this is a really bad time to start getting attached to local people.

Raine isn't weirded out, or even paternalistically sympathetic, upon hearing Heather's explanation. Rather, she seems intrigued. I'd normally call this a bad sign - suggestive of some kind of scene kid mental illness fetishization - but given the hints that Raine might know something, it might not be that. Anyway, she ushers the cleaned-up Heather back out into the restaurant and joins her table.

They engage in some chit-chat, which gives the author an opportunity to slip in some exposition. Heather is living off campus not because she chose to, but because her parents were afraid that being around too much noise and social stressors would trigger her, and also they were afraid she'd get raped. Which might be a valid concern, given Heather's "Slipping" fugues. Raine lives on campus, and is a few years older than Heather but still in her undergrad (it doesn't say exactly which year). Raine started with a general humanities degree, but she's narrowed it down to philosophy at this point, and she drops some hints that it's a weird, esoteric kind of philosophy.

Also, this bit of banter definitely earns quotation:

“Raine narrowed her eyes and tapped two fingertips on the tabletop. “You don’t seem crazy to me.”

All my nervous reticence went out the window. What did I have to lose? She’d already seen me covered in sick and shaking with terror. I couldn’t go any lower.

”Appearances are always deceiving.” I managed to pull myself up straighter. “For example, I thought you looked like the sort of girl who would laugh at me being sick and then try to sell me cannabis.”

”Really? Shit.” Raine laughed and ran a hand through her hair. “Definitely not the sort of look I’m going for.”

”And what look might that be?”

”Robin Hood of the urban jungle.””

I like this dialogue, for the most part. Raine's over-interest in Heather feels artificial, but given the likelihood that there are ulterior motives there, well, it might just feel artificial because it is so in-universe.

Granted, there are also some details in Raine's overall conduct that suggest mutual attraction, and don't seem affected. I'm beginning to suspect that Heather is a lot prettier than she thinks she is, at least when she's not covered in blood and vomit.

...also, Heather drops this somewhat confusing bit on us:

““I … “ A lump in my throat. Wanted to look away. Fought the desire to get up and leave. “I can’t have this conversation. I haven’t in … ever, really. Medication never really did anything and I never told anybody the pills didn’t work, so … “”

The pills don't work? And she never told anyone? And, no one could ever TELL, on account of the fugues and panic attacks/seizures? I must be misunderstanding something here, because this is hard to reconcile with the rest of the story so far.

Well, anyway.

Raine asks about Heather's favourite book, since she's a lit major and all, and they chat about books for *just* long enough to put Heather at ease again before Raine guides the conversation back to Heather's mental health. And the questions she starts asking, she acts with an air of such benign, nonchalant curiousity that Heather doesn't bring her defences back up like she automatically would if the tone were more typically patronizing or judgy. Ooooh, she's good. Fuck. Well, hopefully her ulterior motives are benevolent ones, because if not then this lady is dangerous.

Between a combination of Raine's emotional manipulation and Heather not thinking anything she does socially in this town will have consequences at this point, Heather decides to tell her the story of how she was first diagnosed. And, oh boy, it's a doozy.

One night, when Heather was nine years old, she and her twin sister found a magical doorway under Heather's bed. They'd been raised on fairy tales and storybooks, so the sisters just accepted the dream logic of the situation and went through instead of running to get their parents. The realm they visited on the other side, Heather says, was reminiscent of Lewis Carrol's Wonderland. Incomprehensible, but navigable. Full of larger-than-human entities that tried to impart knowledge and wisdom to them, but whose lessons made no sense to a human mind (or at least to a nine year old human's mind). Eventually, Heather found her way back out, but her twin sister didn't follow her. When she returned to their bedroom, Heather found that her twin's bed, clothes, etc were gone. Panicking, she asked her parents what happened to her sister, and they had no idea what she was talking about.

Heather refused to believe she'd never had a twin sister, even though there wasn't a single family photo, official document, or outside observer to suggest the contrary. She also started having her fugues where she thought she was being dragged back into "Wonderland," both in her dreams and occasionally while waking. Six months after the initial incident, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and spent the rest of her childhood drugged up to the gills on antipsychotic meds.

...

"The Eye of God ate my sibling" is such a weirdly specific thing to recur in the fiction I review.

Well, regardless of that, I can see this going three ways:

1. Heather's twin sister - we'll call her Alessa for now - was deleted from the space time continuum, past present and future. Heather retained her memories of her sister due to having been outside of said spacetime continuum during the change.

2. Heather came out of the warp into a parallel universe in which she indeed did not ever have a sister. In which case, her counterpart might have taken her own place in her original universe. This one is unlikely, because there'd probably be other verifiable differences (including in her own body, due to having had such a different gestation and upbringing).

3. Heather indeed never had a sister, but something she encountered in the warp implanted artificial memories of one into her (either intentionally for some reason, or as an accidental consequence of trying to force alien wisdom into human brainmeats). This would be the closest thing to the schizophrenia hypothesis accepted by her parents and doctors in the story.

It could also be that she's actually schizophrenic and dreamed up a non-existent sister and ALSO, COINCIDENTALLY stumbled into real eldritch stuff, but that feels a little too silly for the tone of this story.

...

Raine asks more questions, and Heather answers them. For one point of clarification, she has NOT seen "Wonderland" again in her subsequent Slipping incidents. She's seen glimpses of many alien worlds, but not that one again. The Eye of Truth has appeared again in her periodic night terrors, but never during her waking incidents, and in the former case it's hard to tell if she's just reliving memories of that original meeting or actually having/imagining new ones.

For another, the antipsychotic meds *do* work at stopping her from Slipping and reducing the night terrors. However, they have done absolutely nothing to erode the memories of Alessa, nor do they have any effect on her sightings of the alien wildlife. The latter has just been constant and ongoing from the Wonderland incident onward.

...

Hmm. To me, this suggests that Heather does actually have a psychotic disorder, but it's a post-traumatic one. The "Slipping" and night terrors are hallucinations caused by the trauma. The memories of her sister and the alien fauna sightings are both real, and only tangentially related to Heather having a mental illness.

I wonder if some milder meds would be able to control her actual symptoms without the troublesome side effects of heavy-duty schizophrenia medication. Correctly identifying the problem might allow for an easy solution after all.

...

Raine keeps probing, and eventually Heather tells her about something that she never told the doctors, or even her parents.

““A … an Eye,” I said, and felt my stomach clench. Raine squeezed, I squeezed back. “A giant eye, the great Eye, and it is all the sky, from horizon to horizon.” My voice dwindled and I tried not to shake, tried not to think about what I was saying. I squeezed Raine’s hand until my knuckles were white. “It has a million million servants in the ruins and dust below. And it watches me, and it thinks at me and sorts through the neurons in my brain and forces me to learn things— things about reality, physics— no, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—“”

It's hard to tell if she's just still trying to process everything she DID absorb from the Akashic Record during the Wonderland incident, or if there actually is an ongoing connection that's still force-feeding her more information. In either case, her ability to see Earth's extradimensional biosphere is probably one of the things it taught her that she can't really unlearn.

Of course, what the hell triggered this in her damned bedroom is a rather major question. Unless she left out the part where she and her sister solved the Diophantine Equation or tried to raise the dead or something.

Talking about the Eye makes Heather lose her composure a little, but Raine soothes and calms her down again, still avoiding any appearance of condescension. Then, Raine points out that Heather is very obviously NOT a paranoid schizophrenic. Categorically. That diagnosis hinges on the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Heather has no such inability. She experiences her "hallucinations" of alien creatures constantly, but she's learned to dismiss them as hallucinations; this makes them purely sensory phenomena, rather than symptoms of an altered state of consciousness. Furthermore, antipsychotic drugs have no effect on them, while (as I pointed out myself earlier in this post) they DO have an effect on other issues of Heather's. And even the other symptoms that they do help with aren't at all characteristic of schizophrenia.

Then, she asks Heather if she can see any Beyond organisms right this moment. Heather is hesitant, but finally admits that there's a seaweed monster standing near the entrance of the Aardvark Cafe and just sort of twitching at them. She also describes it in a little more detail than before, describing its "leaves" as being more like tears or rips in the air itself, and its "fronds" being arranged into something roughly like limbs ending in sharp points. At this description, Raine's body language changes entirely, going into action mode. She asks Heather if she ever tried speaking to a creature that looks like this in Greek or Latin. Oooh, these ones are sapient? Sounds like they are, if they can speak a couple of human languages. When Heather answers in the bewildered negative, Raine tensely orders her to be quiet at wait while she texts someone. Then, the person on the other end texts her back a photo of some arcane symbol. Raine leads Heather out of the cafe, and the seaweed monster starts following them; something that these creatures DON'T normally do. When Heather tells Raine about this, Raine turns in the direction indicated and presents her cell phone screen toward it like a priest holding a cross out at a vampire.

“Raine opened the text message she’d received. I glimpsed a picture on the screen for a split second, a jumble of lines. She grinned at me, then she held the phone up and showed it to my hallucination.

A miracle happened.

The scribble-thing screamed, a split-second tearing of rusty nails across the inside of my skull. I clamped my hands to my ears. As quick as it began the sound dissipated and lost all force. The creature unravelled, twisting and pulling at itself, scraps of darkness floating away on the wind until it vanished, the wounds in reality closing up and sliding shut with a papery rustling sound.”

SEAWEED MONSTER NOOOOOO!

A moment of silence to mourn the passing of Best Waifu. :(

Raine tells Heather that she's not going to inflict any more information overload than she's already suffered right now by going into worldbuilding exposition mode. However, to answer her immediate questions, Best Waifu was a "servitor," and the person who texted Raine that anti-servitor glyph is "similar, but not quite the same" as Heather. Interesting. Wonder what the difference is between Heather's "From Beyond" vision, and whatever this other person uses? Raine also copies the glyph onto the back of Heather's hand in sharpie, and tells her that this will hopefully make it a little easier for her to sleep for a while.

...

Hmm. That glyph defeats servitors, and also shields one's mind from the Eye.

On further thought, there's something in the detail of the servitor's death (or retreat, as it may be; that might have been it fleeing to another dimension or something rather than actually dying) that sticks out to me. Heather's description of it sounding like the rustling of book pages as it vanishes seems like very particular wording. A hint that this is some sort of information-based creature? Given that the Eye of Truth is a thing in this story, that would fit. In this case, the monster is either a "servitor" of the Eye Itself, or a construct created from its information-substance by a wizard or the like.

Anyway, if I had to guess based on its behaviour, this particular servitor was a spy drone. It seemed to be following Raine in and out of the café and more or less ignoring Heather, so its master (whoever and whatever they are) was probably using it to track her. Raine running into Heather at that moment was lucky for Raine as well as Heather, in that case.

The glyph, then, is probably a "close the gate" symbol. Cutting its surroundings off from the Akashic Record, or at least suppressing any abnormal interactions between the two. So, unfiltered mental contact is suppressed, and Akashic constructs like the Servitor can't exist.

...or I could be misunderstanding the symbolism entirely, and the Eye isn't actually a God. Just some big eyeball monster who knows a lot of stuff, has some seaweed-y servants, and dislikes a particular rune. That's also possible. Would explain why it only speaks a short list of human languages that it might have learned from medieval era occultists who contacted it, instead of all of them.

...actually, the glyph is said to somewhat resemble the Kabbalistic Tree of Life symbol. If we're going with Kabbalist imagery, the eye is as likely to be associated with envy and malice (the "Evil Eye") as it is with knowledge as per the eastern tradition. Maybe this story is kind of mixing both together? Eh, I guess I just need more information before I can make any better guesses.

It remains to be seen if the other critters Heather can see are also servitors of various kinds, or if most of them are just natural creatures. Her descriptions of the others sounded a lot more biological and naturalistic, but appearances can apparently be deceiving. I guess trying to hail them in Greek would be one way to test.

...

There's a bit of kinda questionable dialogue in the ensuing conversation (Heather using the phrase "phantoms of my diseased brain" out loud was kind of hard for me to take, even assuming that she's learned most of her vocabulary from reading old books rather than talking to people), but not too bad, and it recovers again quickly. With their breakfast finished, Raine walks Heather to her apartment building while asking her about other creatures she's seen in the area. As Heather describes them, Raine takes notes on her phone. None of the other descriptions provoke much reaction from Raine, so most of them probably are just simple critters rather than intelligent actors or servitors.

When they reach the door, Raine tells Heather that she'd love to stay with her longer, but she has classes to get to. She also tells Heather that this town is particularly dangerous for people who can see things that don't like being seen, and that Raine really would like to see Heather getting proper protection before she stumbles into something's crosshairs. In the interest of that, she gives Heather a set of keys and tells her where to find the school's tiny "Medieval Metaphysics" department. Raine and Evee - the person who texted her the anti-Eye glyph - should be there after three this afternoon. Then, with some parting bravado and finger guns (Raine has done the finger guns two or three times thus far; I guess it's just part of her Thing), Raine bids her get some sleep in the meantime and departs. End chapter.


That was a lot longer and denser than I expected. Fortunately, I got in touch with the author of this story since beginning the chapter, and she gave me permission to quote the full text in my reviews. That should make the following chapters much quicker for me to get through and also improve the quality of the reviews, since I can respond to the text without having to summarize it as well. So, that's good. I'm still going to have to treat the Katalepsis posts as part of my weekly quota rather than an addition to them, though; long covid is slowing my pace down pretty badly, and it was probably a bit rash of me to accept three chapters of prose as a single month's fast lane to begin with. I'll see if I can squeeze in an extra post or two in March to make up for this.

As for the story itself, well...it's good. I'm too early in it to say much more than that, but going by this first chapter it's a lot better than I was expecting. It's longer than I prefer introductory chapters to be, but none of its length felt padded or wasteful, and the hook was strong enough in the introductory paragraphs to keep me invested. The fact that the story so accurately captures the feelings of isolation, frustration, and "out-of-sync-ness" that come with mental illness also helped keep my attention. There's also the fortunate coincidence that I've learned enough about occult mumbo jumbo while researching for my Lovecraft and FMA reviews to actually kinda sorta understand it, so that also probably helped. All that aside though, "lesbian scene girls vs. eldritch abominations" is fundamentally a good enough concept that it's kind of hard to mess up.

In short? I'm really excited to keep reading!