#read hfwu tho its genuinely very good if you like visceral horror and the mc is transmasc + the love interest is an autistic guy

[romeavethinker]

when i think about my headcanons for shadow knights, in my mind it's a lot of fun to emphasize the undead part of them, as well as how torturous the maturation process of a newly birthed shadow knight to a fully-realized one could be. the call is an idea i like to ruminate on as well.

laurance talks early on about how being a shadow knight effects his thinking. he hesitates less, and is more inclined to selfish, spiteful thought patterns. i like to think of this being the ebbing tide of the call carefully drawing in and out of the consciousness in increasingly powerful waves. it grows from tiny whispers in the back of a shadow knight's mind into a violent cacophany that boils beneath the skin with terrifying urgency to be let free the longer the knight rejects it.

as for the physical state of being a shadow knight, this is where the emphasis on the necrotic aspects i was talking about comes in. i take a lot of inspiration for my shadow knight headcanons from the novel "hell followed with us" by andrew joseph white. in that book the main character, benji, has been forcibly infected with a disease (referred to as "seraph", the book covers a lot of christian religious themes) that is slowly, over the course of weeks, turning him into a monster. it's essentially like his body is rotting into becoming something new, and the visceral, monstrous imagery and the way his slow evolution from boy to beast is described is very similar to how i picture becoming a shadow knight feels/looks.

here's some relevant excerpts from my copy of the novel for those who haven't read it. the highlighted lines are the parts most accurate to my headcanons of shadow knights (content warning for descriptions of gore):

i kind of like the idea of shadow knights (like laurance) that didn't complete their transformation ritual and/or reject the call and stay in the overworld being punished by their own body with a slower, more agonizing transformation than if they simply accepted their new undeath and killed who they're supposed to in order to reach their full potential.

however it happens though, it's never pretty. a shadow knight's "true" form (when they activate their powers) reeks of sulfur and death, when they grow in size it sounds just as sickening as it looks, spasming limbs and ripping flesh with the deafening noise of crunching bone and tearing ligaments. smoke and something like ichor both pour from their nose and mouth. if irene is light, life, clear water, and cool, solid quartz and marble and gemstones then a servant of shad would, of course, embody the opposite. i suppose by that description you could also draw a comparison between shad/shadow knights and the desolation/the lightless flame from the magnus archives, if anybody is familiar with that show as well.

anyways im rambling, i just needed to word vomit all these ideas since i wanna talk more about my headcanons on here rather than just character analysis posts lmao

#i normally hate gory headcanons bc it always feels like ppl are just trying to make things edgier but like #shadow knights are literally undead #in that vein little side hc that i couldnt find a place for in this post: shadow knights run super hot but have no heartbeat. #they also dont need to eat— food all tastes like ash in their mouth #sorta like ghouls in tokyo ghoul #augh do i have any ORIGINAL hcs??? whatever #read hfwu tho its genuinely very good if you like visceral horror and the mc is transmasc + the love interest is an autistic guy #aphmau #mcd #minecraft diaries #aphblr #shadow knights #shad the destroyer #laurance zvahl #brainrotting (headcanons) #cw gore