True Face Worship: Inspiration
In this chapter/episode, Theo embraces being a vessel of the unmoored True Face, and has a visitation of his own. This is the last time we meet Myrddin (in this book) who keeps his word and backs off, but you also see how much more powerful he is than Ricky in terms of prophetic and oracular power. Myrddin can look at something mundane like the flame of a lighter and see mysteries – he can tell the future in the glow of a traffic light. He can’t help it. It comes as naturally to him as breathing. Ricky has to concentrate and has learned specific things – birds in flight, the weather, bones, runes. He struggled with interpretation in The Crows and his new form allows him to see the future much more clearly (except his own, still). He’ll have to take control of the crystal cave and the web of the wyrd in the Outside in order to see everything, but as he learned on his cocoon-trip in Thirteenth, that may cost him (it will hurt, and he didn’t trust it).
Meanwhile, the True Face doesn’t care about patterns and predictions, it’s pure chaos.
If you want to check out the Lovecraft short story that inspired a lot of these concepts, you can read Nyarlathotep for free here, and The Crawling Chaos for free here.
There’s also quite a bit of The Void (2016) in this, which is an amazingly low budget Canadian film with esoteric cults, pregnancy horror, medical horror, cults-cults-cults and some great effects they blew the whole budget on.
Another big influence for this was John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness (1994), which I love, as part of his apocalypse trilogy [The first 2 in this loose trilogy are The Thing (1982), and Prince of Darkness (1984), both of which also had quite a lot of influence on my series too!]
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CWs: gore, violence, brainwashed/fanatic POV
Intro/Outro Theme Music: Gemma Dyer
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