Worm Moon is live! Also: Peter S. Beagle’s Unicorns and Scents That Benefit Global Relief Efforts

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Worm Moon is live at Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab and Black Phoenix Trading Post!

 

Gloriously ghoulish artwork by Julie Dillon!

 

 

WORM MOON

Do not smirk as a hearse goes by,

For you may be the next to die.

They wrap you up in a big white sheet

And throw you down six feet deep.

They put you in a big black box,

And cover you up with dirt and rocks.

 

All goes well for a week or two,

Then things start changing; all is new.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

The worms play pinochle on your snout.

 

A big green worm with rolling eyes,

Crawls in your stomach and out your eyes.

Til your blood turns mossy green

And oozes out like Devonshire cream.

 

Worm Moon marks the season of rains, when the worms scuttle forth, aerating the earth with their movements and enriching the soil by digesting waste in organic material, which creates organic fertilizer.

 

This is a melding of Victorian Grotesquery and springtime fecundity: mold-crusted dirt, decomposing organic matter, coffin wood, drooping funeral flowers, congealed blood, gloomy lunar oils, and cuckoo flower with something moist lurking underneath.

 

 

This month, we are introducing a Limited Edition series inspired by the vivid beauty of Yoshitoshi's imagery: Holding Back the Night.

 

These Limited Edition scents were initially intended to be the introduction to a full Yoshitoshi Salon series at BPAL, and was slated for Summer of 2011. Because of recent events in Japan, we have pulled this series forward. Proceeds from these five scents benefit Doctors Without Borders. The Path of Dreams Atmosphere spray at Black Phoenix Trading Post, inspired by Ono No Komachi, also benefits Doctors Without Borders. In addition, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab will be donating proceeds from all March sales of their Shanghai and Kyoto perfumes to the American Red Cross. Black Phoenix Trading Post will be doing the same for all March sales of Shanghai bath oil and Glowing Vulva bath oil.

 

This is a Limited Edition series that will run from 17 March 2011 until 19 May 2011. No imp's ears are available for this series.

 

 

 

+ HOLDING BACK THE NIGHT: SCENTS BENFITTING JAPAN RELIEF

KUSUNOKI TAMONMARU MASATSURA SURPRISING A FOX GHOST

Deep blue musk, olibanum, passion flower, galbanum, immortelle, and sweet myrrh.

 

LORD TEISHIN WITH A DEMON BEHIND A SCREEN

Blood red musk, Spanish mandarin, candied red fruits, Chinese geranium, red pepper, and effervescent tangerine pulp.

 

II NO HAYATA KILLS THE NUE AT THE IMPERIAL PALACE

Brown musk, antiqued amber, black pepper, tolu balsam, and West Indian Bay.

 

MINAMOTO NO YORIMITSU CUTS AT THE EARTH SPIDER

Toasted sandalwood, tobacco flower, teakwood, castoreum accord, bourbon vanilla, and patchouli.

 

ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE COURTESAN JIGOKUDAYU

Silken coconut, angelica, soft golden incense, tiare, carnation, and Asian pear.

 

 

 

+ THE PATH OF DREAMS: BPTP ATMOSPHERE SPRAY

THE PATH OF DREAMS

Although I come to you constantly

over the roads of dreams,

those nights of love

are not worth one waking touch of you.

 

Wisteria, ti, peach tree leaf, osmanthus, hinoki wood, bergamot, night-blooming jasmine, and ume blossoms.

 

 

 

Also new this month: the next installation of our Last Unicorn series!

 

THE HARPY CALANEO

The unicorn began to walk toward the harpy's cage. Schmendrick the Magician, tiny and pale, kept opening and closing his mouth at her, and she knew what he was shrieking, though she could not hear him. "She will kill you, she will kill you! Run, you fool, while she's still a prisoner! She will kill you if you set her free!" But the unicorn walked on, following the light of her horn, until she stood before Celaeno, the Dark One.

 

For an instant the icy wings hung silent in the air, like clouds, and the harpy's old yellow eyes sank into the unicorn's heart and drew her close. "I will kill you if you set me free," the eyes said. "Set me free."

 

The unicorn lowered her head until her horn touched the lock of the harpy's cage. The door did not swing open, and the iron bars did not thaw into starlight. But the harpy lifted her wings, and the four sides of the cage fell slowly away and down, like the petals of some great flower waking at night. And out of the wreckage the harpy bloomed, terrible and free, screaming, her hair swinging like a sword. The moon withered and fled.

 

The unicorn heard herself cry out, not in terror but in wonder, "Oh, you are like me!" She reared joyously to meet the harpy's stoop, and her horn leaped up into the wicked wind. The harpy struck once, missed, and swung away, her wings clanging and her breath warm and stinking. She burned overhead, and the unicorn saw herself reflected on the harpy's bronze breast and felt the monster shining from her own body. So they circled one another like a double star, and under the shrunken sky there was nothing real but the two of them. The harpy laughed with delight, and her eyes turned the color of honey. The unicorn knew that she was going to strike again.

 

Clanging metal, smouldering hatred, and terror: vetiver, myrrh, patchouli, tolu balsam, black clove, bergamot, orange flower, and horseradish.

 

 

 

ELLI'S SONG

"Most shows," said Rukh after a time, "would end here, for what could they possibly present after a genuine unicorn? But Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival holds one more mystery yet - a demon more destructive than the dragon, more monstrous than the manticore, more hideous than the harpy, and certainly more universal than the unicorn." He waved his hand toward the last wagon and the black hangings began to wriggle open, though there was no one pulling them. "Behold her!" Rukh cried. "Behold the last, the Very End! Behold Elli!"

 

Inside the cage, it was darker than the evening, and cold stirred behind the bars like a live thing. Something moved in the cold, and the unicorn saw Elli - an old, bony, ragged woman who crouched in the cage rocking and warming herself before a fire that was not there. She looked so frail that the weight of the darkness should have crushed her, and so helpless and alone that the watchers should have rushed forward in pity to free her. Instead, they began to back silently away, for all the world as though Elli were stalking them. But she was not even looking at them. She sat in the dark and creaked a song to herself in a voice that sounded like a saw going through a tree, and like a tree getting ready to fall.

 

What is plucked will grow again,

What is slain lives on,

What is stolen will remain -

What is gone is gone.

 

"She doesn't look like much, does she?" Rukh asked. "But no hero can stand before her, no god can wrestle her down, no magic can keep her out - or in, for she's no prisoner of ours. Even while we exhibit her here, she is walking among you, touching and taking. For Elli is Old Age."

 

The cold of the cage reached out to the unicorn, and wherever it touched her she grew lame and feeble. She felt herself withering, loosening, felt her beauty leaving her with her breath. Ugliness swung from her mane, dragged down her head, stripped her tail, gaunted her body, ate up her coat, and ravaged her mind with remembrance of what she had once been. Somewhere nearby, the harpy made her low, eager sound, but the unicorn would gladly have huddled in the shadow of her bronze wings to hide from this last demon. Elli's song sawed away at her heart.

 

What is sea-born dies on land,

Soft is trod upon.

What is given burns the hand -

What is gone is gone.

 

The horrors of entropy, death, and decay: desiccated black mosses, vetiver, olibanum, patchouli, and ashes.

 

 

CAPTAIN CULLY

"I'm merry twenty-four hours a day, Dick Fancy," Cully said coldly. "That is a fact."

 

A cocky light musk with leather, tonka, a dusting of dry woods, and a splash of porter.

 

 

MAGIC, DO AS YOU WILL

Cully smiled impatiently, and Jack Jingly dozed, but it startled the magician to see the disappointment in Molly Grue's restless eyes. Sudden anger made him laugh. He dropped seven spinning balls that had been glowing brighter and brighter as he juggled them (on a good evening, he could make them catch fire), let go all his hated skills, and closed his eyes. "Do as you will," he whispered to the magic. "Do as you will."

 

It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret - in his shoulderblade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding. Weak with power, he sank to his knees and waited to be Schmendrick again.

 

I wonder what I did. I did something.

 

He opened his eyes. Most of the outlaws were chuckling and tapping their temples, glad of the chance to mock him. Captain Cully had risen, anxious to pronounce that part of the entertainment ended. Then Molly Grue cried out in a soft, shaking voice, and all turned to see what she saw.

 

The ecstasy of magic and the power of transformation: frankincense, guggul gum, onycha accord, styrax, and deep purple fruits.

 

 

THE AMOROUS TREE

"Gently, gently," he counseled himself. "No man with the power to summon Robin Hood - indeed, to create him - can be bound for long. A word, a wish, and this tree must be an acorn on a branch again, this rope be green in a marsh." But he knew before he called on it that whatever had visited him for a moment was gone again, leaving only an ache where it had been. He felt like an abandoned chrysalis.

 

"Do as you will," he said softly. Captain Cully roused at his voice, and sang the fourteenth stanza.

 

"There are fifty swords without the house, and fifty more within,

And I do fear me, captain, they are like to do us in."

"Ha' done, ha' done," says Captain Cully, "and never fear again,

For they may be a hundred swords, but we are seven men."

 

"I hope you get slaughtered," the magician told him, but Cully was asleep again. Schmendrick attempted a few simple spells for escaping, but he could not use his hands, and he had no more heart for tricks. What happened instead was that the tree fell in love with him and began to murmur fondly of the joy to be found in the eternal embrace of a red oak. "Always, always," it sighed, "faithfulness beyond any man's deserving. I will keep the color of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name. There is no immortality but a tree's love."

 

"I'm engaged," Schmendrick excused himself. "To a western larch. Since childhood. Marriage by contract, no choice in the matter. Hopeless. Our story is never to be."

 

A gust of fury shook the oak, as though a storm were coming to it alone. "Galls and fireblight on her!" it whispered savagely. "Damned softwood, cursed conifer, deceitful evergreen, she'll never have you! We will perish together, and all trees shall treasure our tragedy!"

 

Along his length Schmendrick could feel the tree heaving like a heart, and he feared that it might actually split in two with rage. The ropes were growing steadily tighter around him, and the night was beginning to turn red and yellow. He tried to explain to the oak that love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal, and then he tried to yell for Captain Cully, but he could only make a small, creaking sound, like a tree. She means well, he thought, and gave himself up for loved.

 

A tree in love: misty, rose-flecked leaves, warm bark, and shuddering branches.

 

 

SCHMENDRICK

Wonder and love and great sorrow shook Schmendrick the Magician then, and came together inside him, and filled him, filled him until he felt himself brimming and flowing with something that was none of these. He did not believe it, but it came to him anyway, as it had touched him twice before and left him more barren than he had been. This time, there was too much of it for him to hold: it spilled through his skin, sprang from his fingers and toes, welled up equally in his eyes and his hair and the hollows of his shoulders. There was too much to hold, too much ever to use; and still he found himself weeping with the pain of his impossible greed. He thought, or said, or sang, I did not know that I was so empty, to be so full.

 

A scent of unexplored potential: sweet, raw tobacco leaves, chamomile, clary sage, Mysore sandalwood, sultana raisins, and caramel.

 

 

MOLLY GRUE

Molly said something strange then, for a woman who never slept a night through without waking many times to see if the unicorn was still there, and whose dreams were all of golden bridles and gentle young thieves. "It's the princesses who have no time," she said. "The sky spins and drags everything along with it, princesses and magicians and poor Cully and all, but you stand still. You never see anything just once. I wish you could be a princess for a little while, or a flower, or a duck. Something that can't wait."

 

She sang a verse of a doleful, limping song, halting after each line as she tried to recall the next.

 

Who has choices need not choose.

We must, who have none.

We can love but what we lose -

What is gone is gone.

 

Schmendrick peered over the unicorn's back into Molly's territory. "Where did you hear that song?" he demanded. It was the first he had spoken to her since the dawn when she joined the journey. Molly shook her head.

 

"I don't remember. I've known it a long time."

 

The land had grown leaner day by day as they traveled on, and the faces of the folk they met had grown bitter with the brown grass; but to the unicorn's eyes Molly was becoming a softer country, full of pools and caves, where old flowers came burning out of the ground. Under the dirt and indifference, she appeared only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old - no older than Schmendrick, surely, despite the magician's birthdayless face. Her rough hair bloomed, her skin quickened, and her voice was nearly as gentle to all things as it was when she spoke to the unicorn. The eyes would never be joyous, any more than they could ever turn green or blue, but they too had wakened in the earth. She walked eagerly into King Haggard's realm on bare, blistered feet, and she sang often.

 

An angry little beetle with her own kitchen beauty: fig, sesame, hazelnut, and cooking spices softened by rice flower.

 

 

 

UNICORN HORN: PACK OF SERIES II IMP'S EARS

Imp's ears are not sold individually for this series.

They must be purchased in a set.

This set contains 7 imps for $38.50US, and contains samples of:

 

• The Harpy Calaneo
  
• Elli's Song
  
• Captain Cully
  
• Magic, Do As You Will
  
• The Amorous Tree
  
• Schmendrick
  
• Molly Grue
  

 

 

 

Not-so-awesome news --

We grieve: Silk Road is being discontinued, effective immediately. Outstanding orders will be filled, but we cannot accept new orders for this scent.

 

 

 

VERY awesome news --

 

Coming soon!