Audio Release for Yelen & Yelena Chapter 16: The Curse-Damned and Chapter 17: The Mortress’s Games
It’s a 2-for-1 special today, with another 2 chapters released on Eldritch Girl in one episode. The two chapters are both very short, so the total runtime of this episode is still only ~34mins.
In these chapters, Yelena discovers the downside of living in the castle for so long, and the Mortress begins to interfere.
CWs: Nightmares of the rot, possession horror, autonomy, relapse
Listen nowRead alongMusic Credits:
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Intro/Outro:
Quinn’s Dream: The Dance Begins
Soundtrack:
Bittersweet,
Quinn’s Dream: A New Man,
Giant Wyrm,
Morgana Rides,
Magic Forest,
Redletter
Possession in this magic system requires some form of verbal consent, a pledge, a promise, something that can be taken as an invitation. How this is procured doesn’t matter; the vessel must mean it in the moment, but that’s the site of horror, because in Velna’s case it was agree or die.
The other thing is then becoming a conscious passenger in your own body – not fun either.
There’s a lot of gnarly stuff in the last section of the book, but for me, I think the possession stuff pushes it further into Horror-Fantasy, and it spirals down until the ending, when things are resolved more hopefully.
I would like to explore the concept and implications of possession a bit more in other books, and look at different ways it can be achieved and different experiences of it.
‘Soul fusion’ isn’t exactly possession, but that’s another aspect that I’ll be looking at in As Below, So Above.


