Etla Isle

Tarsus has mentioned:

The Spheres of Longing, Author Unknown

An old, obscure manuscript discovered some decades ago and reprinted for mass consumption. An unnamed narrator speaks of his time among a race of strange, cone-shaped beings of profoundly alien psychology. It deals less with the narrator's day to day experiences than with his attempt to explain and codify their inscrutably complex philosophies and ways of seeing the world.

Nearly everyone assumes the narrative is fictional, a plot device used to make some greater point. Some people pretend to have read and understood it; few have done the former and almost nobody the latter. It's one of those books.

Tarsus sure as hell doesn't get it either, but he is one of the few people in the world who knows that it is not a work of fiction.

-

Cold Stars, by R. Hopewell

"There is a hole in the soul of man. A bottomless void that no amount of light, heat, life, or love can fill. I am the voice of that abyss."


A madman recounts his view of the end of the world through the window of his cell in an asylum - an end he is ultimately responsible for. A monster hunter chases a presumed vampire through a dead, twisted woodland only to come face to face with something far worse than any son of Cain. An ancient star-spawned predator muses on its last kill and the nature of its own existence before it slinks beneath the earth to hibernate.

These and several other strange and macabre tales greet the reader of Cold Stars, a collection of short horror fiction, authored several years ago by the pseudonymous R. Hopewell. A somewhat ironic pen name, for the various stories' broad themes fundamentally deal with hopelessness, crushing revelations, and mortal men confronting the ineffable.

Almost none of Hopewell's various protagonists make it out alive, and they're the lucky ones.  The author has a way of evoking a sense of creeping dread even when precise physical descriptions of his various horrors aren't terribly forthcoming.

Tarsus is the book's true author, and wrote it during a particularly dark period to work through a bout of depression.

(This story is a wonderful analogue for the above, and an excellent excuse to pimp my current fave RL author to a new potential audience :3)

This surprised me, so I decided to see if I could suss some things out, mostly for the sake of my own curiosity.

The top picture is a modern display piece made by a company called Denix, said to have been based on a historical original but actually not. They just say it is in order to sell it. In fact, they're probably mixing up elements of the stonebow below it.

Stonebows were primarily used for hunting small game birds.

There was something called a 'ballestrino' in 16th century Italy and Spain but it worked substantially differently. No pistol grip, but an internal cocking mechanism that pulls back the string as you turn the handle.

An artisan named Leo Todeschini who does working period reproductions reproduced one, and concluded it would be ineffective as a weapon.

http://www.todsstuff.co.uk/crossbows/crossbows-types.htm

His reproduction, assessment, and a link to a video of the reproduction bow in action are at the very bottom of the above page.

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Above is a ballestrino from the Metropolitan museum of art. They were apparently quite rare and this example contains a number of unique elements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7bU_3EkH0

A broader treatment of the subject of small crossbows, wrist crossbows, and the physics of crossbows in general by Skallagrim.

This is not me trying to discourage anyone from going that route, but to provide background on the real-world particulars, such as they are.