Aspen Rayne

@aspenrayne.com

1068 Followers 1149 Following

29 ✨He/it ✨Writer✨Acearo disaster ✨Working on ten novels (1 done, 8 editing, 1 writing)✨ aspenrayne.com

Preorder announcement for the queer gothic novel The Colors That Haunt Us by Aspen Rayne, available October 8; left features a painterly back-view portrait of a woman in a red dress against a deep red background, with gold decorative text and ornate borders.
A white blended drink with whipped cream and freeze dried lemon drops on top
Promotional graphic for the novel "The Colors That Haunt Us" by Aspen Rayne, featuring a person with brown hair and a red dress seen from behind against a burgundy background, with gold text announcing the release date of October 8th.
Book cover for The Colors That Haunt Us by Aspen Rayne. The cover features a painterly portrait of a woman turned away against a deep red background, with large antique gold title text along the left side and the author name at the bottom.
A gray and white bicolor cat on a white blanket with his paw stretched out so you can see his beans
Couldn’t Suzette accept the mercy of that? Couldn’t she accept Clara instead? Suzette's shoulders shook. “No,” she whispered, though whether she meant Clara, the house, or the substitution itself Clara could not tell.
A photo of a shallow river filled with rocks and surrounded by various trees and a big fluffy cloud in the sky
“Keep driving east,” he said. “After a while the road stops belonging to you. After that, you’ll find it.” Clara frowned. “That’s not directions.” “It’s what there is.”
A chaotic web showing the articles in my obsidian vault. None of the titles are visible.
Suzette faced the artist in a three-quarter profile, dark hair pinned back, mouth softened by the beginning of a smile Clara had never seen on her. Another figure stood close at her side, close enough that their shoulders touched. Not accidental closeness. Familiar closeness. The sort that changed the whole balance of a painting.
A gathering in the parlor. Women in jewel-toned gowns reclined on the settees, the velvet bright and untouched by age. Men in high collars and waistcoats stood with glasses of champagne, their faces animated mid-laughter, mid-conversation. The sconces glowed soft gold on the wallpaper's now bright damask pattern. Music hung in the air—silent, imagined—painted in the tension of a bowed violin and the curve of a pianist's fingers at the keys.
A gray and white cat with his chin resting on an arm
Book cover for The Colors That Haunt Us by Aspen Rayne. The cover features a painterly portrait of a woman turned away against a deep red background, with large antique gold title text along the left side and the author name at the bottom.
Book cover for The Colors That Haunt Us by Aspen Rayne. The cover features a painterly portrait of a woman turned away against a deep red background, with large antique gold title text along the left side and the author name at the bottom.
A gray and white cat on a gray bed
Book cover for The Colors That Haunt Us by Aspen Rayne. The cover features a painterly portrait of a woman turned away against a deep red background, with large antique gold title text along the left side and the author name at the bottom.
Water warmed in the kettle, its hiss the only sound. She peeled an orange with steady hands, the skin curling away to release a clean, bright scent. Each task, lighting, slicing, peeling, carried its own small weight. Physical anchors to keep her rooted in a house that still felt capable of putting her out.
A gray and white cat is lying on a bed with a gray sheet and dark muted green blanket
Quote on a maroon background: "The library did not feel like a room she had entered now so much as a witness finally prepared to speak." Below the quote is the url www.aspenrayne.com
Vibe Check Sunday Weekly Writer Prompt What is one thing your current project is finally starting to reveal about itself? 2026 - 06 - 21 Quote post using #VibeCheckSunday and don't forget to support others!
A gray and white cut staring into the camera sleepily
A baby snow leopard stands atop of a fallen log and rock outcropped.
A gray and white bi color cat curled up in a shrimp position
A grey and white bicolor cat stretched out belly up on a green comforter
Vibe Check Sunday Weekly Writer Prompt What forbidden or terrible or wildly inadvisable thing does your main character want most right now? 2026-06-14 Quote post using #VibeCheckSunday and don't forget to support others!
Vibe Check Sunday Weekly Writer Prompt What kind of place does your story want to live in right now? 2026-06-07 Quote post using #VibeCheckSunday and don't forget to support others!
Vibe Check Sunday Weekly Writer Prompt What is your project full of this week? Longing, blood, fog, bad decision, devotion, or something stranger? 2026-05-31 Quote post using #VibeCheckSunday and don't forget to support others!
Gothic-themed graphic with a writing prompt: "Are you drafting, revising, plotting, researching, or staring at your project and hoping it explains itself?" Date: 2026-05-24.
Mystical graphic with a castle silhouette, ink and quill, and writing prompt: "What feeling is your current project living in right now?"
My dearest friend, Mrs Rosenfeld has kept me indoors again, though the weather is mild enough for the orchard and I cannot help but think of you each time the wind moves through the eastern trees. I have left your last note tucked inside the Byron volume where no one thinks to look. When the roses bloom again, meet me if you can by the south wall, where the stone keeps the afternoon warmth. I remain what I have always been in this house, a daughter in name and a prisoner in practice, but your voice makes rebellion feel almost holy. Do not answer through the servant if you can avoid it. Use the old place behind the music room. She watches more closely now. My dearest friend, if they force me to leave this unsaid, know at least that I was happiest in those hours when you sat at the piano and pretended not to look at me. —S. Rosenfeld
The brass handle yielded too easily under her fingers, and the heavy door opened with a whisper, giving her the darkened halls within. There were no electric lamps anywhere she could see, only sconces for candles, glass-chimney oil lamps, and fireplaces built to throw light as much as heat. The air inside was still, but not stale. It carried stone and polish, dust and something sweeter underneath, floral, fading, almost pleasant until it pressed too deep into memory and made her think of bouquets she had not managed to throw away quickly enough.
VIBE CHECK Sunday WEEKLY WRITER PROMPT Which character is causing the most problems right now? 2026 - 05 - 03 Quote post using #VibeCheckSunday and don't forget to support others!
In the earliest sketch, Lysanne’s eyes had darkened. In the next, the mouth had sharpened into something meaner, less hers. In the third, the angle of the jaw no longer matched either the woman Clara had loved or the photo hidden in her sketchbook. By the fourth, the resemblance was slipping entirely. Clara laid the altered sketches side by side with a blank page and began to redraw Lysanne from memory. Quickly. Before the details could move. Oval face. Fine nose. Curls tucked behind one ear. She stopped with the pencil hovering over the page. Which ear? Clara squeezed her eyes shut and tried to picture Lysanne at the kitchen counter in their old apartment, coffee mug in hand, morning light on her profile. Nothing held. The image came in fragments and refused to settle.
The single curl falling over Suzette’s cheek caught Clara the way the house had been catching her for days, softly and beautifully, making the next step feel inevitable before it felt chosen. Want and warning hit her in the same breath, sweet enough to draw her forward and sharp enough to feel like a trap. She knew, suddenly and for no good reason, that if she kept moving toward Suzette like this, she would lose something she would not know how to name until it was gone. Before she could stop herself, Clara reached out to brush the loose curl back from Suzette’s face. Her fingers passed through her.
Clara pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum as if she could hold herself together by force. It did nothing. The sensation sharpened into need so quickly it made her dizzy, a clean bright hunger that did not feel like hers and still knew exactly where to hurt. Her fingers began to shake. A thin ache spread behind her right eye. No pain yet. Promise of pain. She needed to paint. No, she thought immediately, fiercely. No. She turned away from the conservatory and walked toward the kitchen on purpose, each step deliberate. Bread. Tea. List-making. She would sit down. She would count to one hundred. She would not go back. By twenty-three, her vision had blurred at the edges. By forty, the ache behind her eye had swollen into a hard, pulsing throb. By sixty-one, she was gripping the table so hard her knuckles had gone white. At seventy-two she stood so abruptly the chair legs scraped.
Clara thought of the residency email. Solitude. No staff. No other artists. So why was this woman here? The question rose cleanly and stopped at the back of her throat. Clara did not ask it, not from cowardice exactly, but because some part of her already understood that the answer would not merely disturb the corridor, but alter it. Instead, she nodded. "Well… I should get back to work." Suzette did not answer. She only watched. Clara took a step back, then another. When she turned, she felt the weight of Suzette's gaze pressing between her shoulder blades. As she turned the corner, she heard a whisper behind her, so soft it might have been the house itself settling around a word. “Let her go.” Clara stumbled. For one sick second she did not know whether the voice meant mercy or surrender.
Promotional image for "Vibe Check Sunday" with a Gothic castle, a quill pen, and a writing prompt asking about the emotional weather of your current project.
She stormed past the house and the choked garden path where vines tangled with thorn and rot. The trail behind it, barely visible beneath moss and fallen leaves, curved uphill between the trees. The air was thick and close, swollen with the promise of rain. It smelled like wet stone and earth left too long to steep, the kind of scent that settled in the lungs and refused to leave. The path narrowed, then widened again, thinning into loose soil and jutting roots until it opened onto a cliffside. The drop wasn't enormous—twenty feet, maybe thirty—but it was steep, sharp, and jagged. Far below the trees bowed to some distant wind, branches creaking like old bones. She stepped closer to the edge, boots crunching gravel, the ground crumbling in dry chunks beneath her feet.
Across the hall,the overlays updated again. Surviving trunk-lines burned in steady red. Damaged relay paths flashed amber. Sealed personnel clusters remained pale. The display did not distinguish between trapped clerks, unconscious workers, or the emergency operators themselves. Life had become congestion data around a protected core. His optics sharpened the image until every partition line stood out with merciless clarity. The cognisync began sorting interventions in punishing sequence, lower vault access, emergency dampener path, manual rupture points, route seizure from the regulator spine. One by one the options constricts are the containment geometry settled into place. The faster he thought, the smaller the field became.
"This institution has three expectations. You will survive as long as survival remains compatible with order. You will comply in all assignments. You will produce according to need."
"Here. This is your preferred state. Compression high, drift minimal, apparent coherence excellent." She looked up at him. "And from this point forward, if the system takes additional stress, it can only preserve equilibrium by converting the excess somewhere else." "It converts it into a tighter response." "No," she said. "Into bodies." The room seemed to lose a degree of warmth. She expanded the model. Smaller lines bloomed outward from the main route like fractures in thin ice, each tagged with interface classes, worker nodes, licensed civic links, augmentation support grids. Swordbreak's infrastructure did not end at walls and rails. It touched flesh everywhere. Dock handlers with spinal load braces. Signal clerks with sensory implants. Transit operators using interface cuffs. Industrial med-techs with respiratory nodes or diagnostic grafts. People barely more machine-touched than necessary, but touched enough.
Callan didn't mourn the endings. He had learned that love was not something to hold onto; it was something to experience fully, in the moment, without regret. He gave himself freely to those who caught his eye, leaving pieces of himself in each realm. There was Ryn, whose laughter lit up the darkened waters of their underwater life; Kaede whose fiery passion rivaled the volcanic landscape they called home; and countless others, each leaving their mark on his heart.
clara-paints Follow starting an artist residency tomorrow in the middle of nowhere because apparently my post-breakup coping mechanism is “accepting suspicious invitations from strangers” now #artist residency #post breakup behavior #this is either healing or a cry for help #free housing is free housing #trying not to think too hard about the phrasing 14,382 notes Oldest replies first brushrot Follow Girl what do you mean suspicious? clara-paints I mean I did not apply to it, they found me somehow, and the email said the estate had “been waiting a long time for someone like you,” which is probably normal rich people nonsense houseofmirth That is the least normal sentence I have ever read lacrimosa-lesbian You are going to get haunted clara-paints Counter point, free room and board clara-paints Follow made it to the residency. stopped at a gas station on the way and asked for directions to the manor and everyone in the building started acting like I had asked where they keep the live bodies #residency posting #small town vibes are rancid #trying to be normal about this #it was probably just local gossip #probably 27,044 notes clara-paints Follow bad news: I think the house is haunted worse news: the haunting is beautiful #residency posting 88,531 notes Oldest replies first yuri-beam Follow HELLO???? clara-paints before everyone gets excited I did not say she was a ghost yuri-beam you said “the haunting is beautiful” clara-paints that could mean many things fungalrealness it means lesbianism in a haunted wig cathedralriot op saw one tragic woman in a hallway and folded immediately clara-paints you people are projecting
r/relationships u/DeadRose I think my situationship is dead, from 1890-something, and tied to an evil house. Advice? I’m 29F, she’s... complicated. I’m staying at a remote manor for an art residency after a bad breakup. There’s this woman, Suzette, who appears and disappears randomly, knows the house better than anyone, and keeps telling me I need to leave. The problem is: she is beautiful she is sad I have a terrible history with sad beautiful women the house seems jealous I’ve also found historical records suggesting she may have died there under suspicious circumstances. How do I tell whether this is romance, haunting, or a red flag so large it has become load-bearing?
The image is a widely recognized meme format depicting a distracted boyfriend. Transcribed Text: HOT SLEEP PARALYSIS DEMON REX SELF PRESERVATION
A humorous bingo card titled "REX'S LIFE" with whimsical scenarios in a 5x5 grid. Transcribed Text: REX'S LIFE cursed inventory haunted customers emotional support tea forbidden codex identity fraud cat barista with secrets magical OSHA violations one (1) cursed object too many suspiciously specific wards dream problems "That is not a normal cat" customer service voice under duress "I can fix him" (Free space) books that should not be opened taking on other's pain winter in Provo, but make it ominous magical quarantine shelf found family trauma bundle one more bad decision yearning via astral projection trying so hard not to have a breakdown hot sleep paralysis demon not paid enough for this tea-based intervention shop cat knows your sins
The image is a two-panel comic showing a cartoon dog sitting inside a room engulfed in flames. The dog, wearing a small hat, appears calm despite the chaotic surroundings. The first panel shows the dog sitting at a table with a mug, flames surrounding it. Three phrases: "wards flaring," "cat staring like it forged documents," and "cursed customer" are superimposed over this panel. The second panel features a close-up of the dog with a speech bubble saying, "THIS IS FINE." The dog's expression remains unbothered, even though the fire continues to burn around it.
The workshop existed for three nights before Veyr trusted it enough to bleed in it. Not all at once. Not foolishly. He had no illusions left about dramatic transformation, no fantasies about prison scrap making him stronger in any clean heretic sense. Coldstone cured people of those ideas quickly. What he wanted now was narrower and far more dangerous. Not better. Harder. He stood in the condemned service alcove with his shirt stripped to the waist, prison wool tied off around his hips, the weak lamp cell breathing its dirty red light through the filter mesh cradle he had built for it. The walls around him held old aether memory in tired little traces, enough to wake the copper wire strung across the work ledge and make the surgical clamps hum faintly when he laid them down. Cold seeped through the stone underfoot. Dust waited in the corners like another material category.
He descended from the dais at last, not hurrying, stepping through the red-white light cast by the conduit trunks. His optics overlaid the hall and symptoms and systems. Thermal rise at the support collars. Elevated ambient particulate. SHort micro-arcs along exposed interface hardware. Human pulse irregularity where workers wore insufficient shields. The cognisync ordered it all into a hierarchy of relevance. The suffering of the workers ranked below the line stability of the facility. That was not cruelty. It was sequence. He stopped beside the first fallen technician. The man's body still twitched in diminishing bursts, but the cuff was burnt dark now, its internal lattice fused. The failure had been local and catastrophic. The implant had tried to negotiate a load beyond its calibration range, then offered itself to the current when it could not. A bad design for this environment. Or rather, a design built for a safer world than the one Arclight had just become.
Farther west, the great refinement towers loomed through the haze. Raw Aether came down from the Ethereal Summit unstable, treacherous, difficult to move even under guard. Here, in Swordbreak, it was condensed, refined, stabilized, tested, sealed, and turned into the fuel beneath all modern life. Lamps, rails, industrial engines, augmentation clinics, civic lighting, liftworks, ministry wards. This was why the capital mattered. Not because the sovereign ruled from it, though they did. Not because the ministries clustered here, though they did that too. Swordbreak mattered because the rest of Obrura was built on the fiction that refined Aether would continue arriving on time and in the right quantities forever. And fiction, Veyr had learned early, was strongest when nobody called it by its name.
That was always the most dangerous moment in Swordbreak,the space between violation and consequence, when a system had been pushed past the line and still had the grace to look obedient. Veyr returned to the core relay hall with that thought moving through him like a second pulse. The chamber rose around him in blackened iron and pressure glass, its upper gantries lost in vapor-lit haze. Major conduit trunks crossed overhead and through the floor in sealed channels bright with refined aether, red-white at the heart, scarlet at the edges where saturation licked the inner walls. The hall's central displays were already lined with the activation sequence. Engineers stood at their stations. Relay technicians monitored civic branch load. Apprentices moved too carefully, sensing tension without understanding its shape. Somewhere above, beyond the observation rails, administrators still had the option to issue a stand down order. He gave them nothing left to stop.
I nodded, but the buzz under my skin didn’t fade. It wasn’t fear. It was wrong. Like he’d touched something that wasn’t meant to be touched. "Martin."  "What?" Paige looked up from the book, head tilted. The cat jumped down onto the desk, tail twitching, eyes fixed on the book. "No, no don't—" I moved to grab him, but he dodged, landing on the edge of the desk. "Martin?" Paige repeated. "As in your secret dream man?" "He's not my dream man." I muttered. "He's a man in my dreams." I pulled a notebook out of the drawer. "There was something he said last night—something about being trapped. I wrote it all down. The guy today was looking for someone. He didn't want me to find him." "But you don't know who he's talking about."
A grey and white bicolor cat wrapped up in a dark green blanket.
“I’m not going to break it,” I said, glancing up at him. “Breaking it could spread whatever’s tangled in it, like popping a stink bomb. You don’t want to do that in a small room.” He blinked. “So what are you doing?” “Containing it,” I said. “Temporarily. I’m not punishing the object. I’m preventing harm.” I lowered the bracelet into the jar. The instant it hit glass, the pressure dulled, like a voice muffled by a wall. I screwed the lid on tight and felt the room exhale with me. The guy’s shoulders sagged. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “That— I feel… quieter.” “Because it’s not shouting at you anymore,” I said. I tapped the jar lightly. “This is a feedback loop. It takes what you feel, twists it, hands it back sharper. It doesn’t create anger out of nothing, it just makes it harder to step out of.”
Randall was younger than Martin, by a few years at least, but with an air of determined defiance that immediately reminded me of Kyrell. Randall stepped forward, arms crossed tightly. "So it's true, Martin is in danger, and you didn't think to tell me?" The accusation was pointed directly at Ilsen. Ilsen looked at Seren, then back to Randall, face carefully neutral. "We only found out." Seren leaned closer and whispered to me, allowing the two of them to talk in somewhat privacy. "Our second born." Randall's gaze shifted to me after a few moments. "You're going to go save Martin. And these two were happy to let you do that without talking to me. That could have been a massive mistake." I nodded, feeling suddenly exposed.
She slid the note into a sleeve and her gaze pinned me. “If you break Hunt lines to save a friend, you may lose the right to save anyone after.” "Is that an offer, or an order?" Her lips twitched again, this time closer to a real smile. "A favor." She folded the note once, twice, and slid it back to me like it was a live wire. “Dusk means he moves,” she said. “You stay inside your wards until then. If he contacts you again, you answer, you don’t chase.” She turned and walked out of the shop, and just like that, I’d become a problem on her ledger, too. The bell above the door gave one soft chime before the silence settled in again. The air felt different—thinner somehow, like the space she'd occupied had been holding everything together, and now it was just… gone.
I stopped first at the back corner of the shop as I passed the landing, on the narrow shelf I’d labeled in my head as the Cooling-Off Shelf. It wasn’t dramatic. No chains, no runes carved into bone. Just a mundane row of glass-front lockboxes and a hand-written tag that said QUARANTINE in my mom’s old blocky handwriting. Anything that felt “off” went there first, not because I liked collecting problems, but because I didn’t destroy things I didn't understand. Obtain, observe, decide. It was the only ethical way I knew to keep something from hurting someone while I figured out what it was. But none of them had been moved. The latch was still closed. The wards pulsed again, sharper this time, not a warning at the threshold but a throb from inside, like something had already crossed.
Fira didn’t move. They could have. Their body screamed for it. The muscle memory of stepping into conflict, of shifting bodies by inches to prevent a blow, of turning a crowd with a word and a hand, hands aching for weapons set down decades before, all of it surged up like a tide. And then the old knowledge slammed down over it, heavier than instinct. This was what the empire wanted. A riot made the paperwork clean. A riot turned an execution into “necessity.” A riot made the next discharge lawful. A riot made tomorrow’s missing bodies administrative.
From outside came the hum. Bleakburn's night voice rolled across the valley, low and constant, a machine breathing somewhere beyond the woods. it set the rhythm of the dark now. People slept to it, woke to it, measured tome by the way it swelled and receded with shifts they couldn't miss. It hadn't always been there. When Fira had left Swordbreak and come back to this valley, it had been quiet enough that you could hear insects in the fields at night. Swordbreak still had room then. Its aether still flowed cleanly enough to pretend limits were distant. Then the rumors started, reserves thinning, deeper digs, sentences disguised as labor. When Swordbreak tightened, Bleakburn expanded, and the air learned a new weight. The village didn't change all at once. It adjusted, the way people do, until the hum became ordinary.
They spoke like they did when breaking up fights. Calm. Measured. No wasted words. "Tarrin is neutral," Fira began. "It has no strategic value beyond its location, and that value is marginal. We are small. Our population density is low. Our infrastructure is minimal." Vahl's pen moved. Scratch. Pause. Scratch. "Recent patrol density," Fira continued, "has already increased baseline stress indicators. Clinic visits related to exposure are up twenty percent since the convoys began passing closer. That correlates with reduced labor output and higher conflict medication load." They slid a page forward. Exposure rates. Flare-pocket maps. Lines marking where contamination pooled after rain. "Escalation here produces diminishing returns," Fira said. "Any additional pressure destabilizes the population faster than it secures routes. The cost curve is steep."