Yorn’s Non-Traditionally Scary Gathering

By the time Yorn made it home, he was in the exact kind of mood that only journalism could produce.

Not tragedy.
Not rage.
Not even true exhaustion.

Just that thin, papery irritation that came from spending all day asking reasonable questions and getting nonsense in return.

His satchel dragged against his side as he climbed the winding path up to the house. The air off the bay was cold enough to catch in his fur. Somewhere out beyond the bluff, the lighthouse blinked with the steady patience of something not required to interview local residents for quotes. He had spent the afternoon chasing a zoning story that had collapsed somewhere around the moment a talking tree refused to comment “without legal representation,” and then implied the Gazette had a bias against root-based stakeholders.

He was done.

He wanted tea.
He wanted quiet.
He wanted to sit down and be unbothered in his own house for at least forty uninterrupted minutes.

Then he opened the front door.

And found candlelight.

Not one or two candles.

Many candles.

Enough candles, placed with enough deliberate mood, that it was immediately clear something was happening and that Elara had been involved in all of it. Soft shadows moved across the walls. Low conversation drifted from the living room. There was the scent of mulled blood-orange cider, old books, and whatever faintly haunted perfume Elara used when she wanted a room to feel like it had history.

Yorn stopped in the doorway, still wearing his coat.

“…Hello?”

From the living room came laughter.

He stepped in and found Elara on the long couch with Ramses, Philip, and Oyuki, all of them arranged in that easy, intimate sprawl of people several drinks into a very specific kind of evening. Elara sat with one leg tucked beneath her, dark eyes bright in the candlelight. Ramses had a teacup in both hands and was radiating wrapped-up composure. Philip lounged with his usual carefully casual slouch, one bony wrist over the back cushion like he’d been born to brood in lamplight. Oyuki hovered just an inch above her seat, pale and serene, her expression content in the way only a ghost discussing niche grievances could be.

The whole room looked warm, weird, and extremely intentional.

Yorn set his satchel down slowly.

“What’s going on?”

Elara looked up immediately and smiled.

“Oh, good, you’re home.”

Yorn looked from face to face. “Clearly.”

Elara patted the arm of the couch. “We’re just having a little get-together.”

Ramses nodded. “A quiet evening.”

Philip lifted his mug. “A themed gathering, if you want to be technical.”

That made Yorn narrow his eyes.

“What kind of themed gathering.”

Elara’s smile took on the slightest edge of sheepishness.

“You know,” she said lightly, “just us… traditionally scary types.”

There was a beat.

Yorn blinked.

Then blinked again.

“Traditionally scary.”

Philip gestured vaguely around the room as though this explained itself.

“Vampire,” he said, pointing toward Elara.

“Mummy,” said Ramses, with a little lift of his cup.

“Skeleton,” Philip added, touching his own chest.

“Ghost,” Oyuki said softly.

Ramses gave a small, grave nod. “The classics.”

Oyuki, clearly pleased with the category, added, “It’s nice, every now and then, to be among people who understand the burden of having an inherently unnerving silhouette.”

Philip sighed. “We were just discussing how horror films continue to misunderstand all of us at a conceptual level.”

Yorn stood there for a second longer, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

None came.

Then he asked, as calmly as he could manage, “Why wasn’t I invited?”

This time Elara did wince.

“It was a little last-minute.”

“You live with me.”

“Yes, but—”

“You started a themed gathering in my house and didn’t invite me.”

Philip, to his credit, looked mildly apologetic.

“Well,” he said, “we weren’t sure if you counted.”

Yorn stared at him.

“Counted.”

Ramses lifted one hand in a diplomatic little gesture. “Not personally. Taxonomically.”

Yorn pointed at himself in outrage.

“I’m a yeti.”

“Yes,” said Elara gently.

“I’m a cryptid.”

Philip tilted his skull. “In a broad sense.”

“In a broad sense?”

“You’re fuzzy,” Philip said. “You’re not gothic.”

Yorn made a disbelieving noise.

“I live in the woods. I’m huge. I loom naturally. I have startled several people by accident in moonlight.”

“You also write op-eds about mushroom conservation,” Philip said.

“That has nothing to do with my fear profile.”

“It does a little.”

Oyuki, who clearly felt sympathy but not enough to change sides, said, “You’re scary in a very regional way.”

That, somehow, was worse.

Yorn looked at Elara, who at least had the decency to seem conflicted.

“You didn’t think I was traditionally scary.”

Elara took a careful sip of cider. “I think you’re wonderful.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“No.”

Yorn stood there another second, absorbing the insult in all its absurd specificity.

Then he nodded once.

“Okay.”

That tone got everyone’s attention.

Elara set down her cup. “Yorn.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“That’s your dangerous voice.”

“I’m not dangerous,” Yorn said, pulling out his phone. “I’m just going to have my own gathering.”

Philip frowned. “Right now?”

“Yes.”

“In the same house?”

“Absolutely.”

Ramses lowered his cup slightly. “This feels reactive.”

“It is reactive,” Yorn said. “That’s what makes it honest.”

He began texting with the full, wounded determination of a man about to make a point and possibly ruin his own evening in the process.

Elara watched him for a moment, then exchanged a look with the others that said, quite clearly, let him.

And so, within the hour, Yorn’s counter-gathering began.

It was not, at least initially, a success.

Brenda arrived first, which was predictable.

She burst through the front door with her purple hair twisted into a messy bun that looked accidental only in the sense that a thunderstorm looks accidental.

“Yorn!” she called, already shrugging off her coat. “I brought tiramisu and strong opinions about cinematography.”

She held up both.

Yorn accepted this without question. “You’re in.”

Brenda stepped into the living room, took in the moody little cluster of traditionally scary people on the couch, and immediately understood enough to be delighted.

“Oh, this is petty.”

“Thank you,” said Yorn.

Pierre arrived next, silent as ever, in a dark coat and scarf, slipping into the foyer like he had been summoned by emotional opportunity alone. Yorn opened the door and Pierre, without a word, placed one hand over his heart, looked solemnly toward the living room, then mimed being excluded from a shadowy social circle before dramatically pointing at himself and nodding as if to say, yes, I too know this pain.

Yorn clapped him once on the shoulder. “Exactly.”

Pierre entered at once and, within seconds, was pretending to emerge from an invisible coffin in what Yorn assumed was support.

Then came Butch McCoy.

He arrived dusty, broad-shouldered, and somehow still faintly smelling of toner and leather, hat tipped back and expression easy.

“Evenin’,” he said as Yorn opened the door. “I was told this was a retaliatory social function.”

“It is.”

Butch nodded. “Good. I respect clear themes.”

He stepped inside carrying a foil-wrapped pie and what looked suspiciously like a tax form tucked into his jacket pocket.

Last came Barnaby Blackbeard, who entered mid-sentence, as Barnaby did most things.

“—and I told the beast, I says, ‘You can have the treasure, but you’ll never take me socks,’ and then—ah! There he is!”

He clapped Yorn hard on the arm.

“Good night for gathering, lad. Heard there was emotional spite involved.”

“Moderate emotional spite,” Yorn said.

Barnaby grinned. “Best kind.”

And so the room split.

On one side: Elara, Ramses, Philip, Oyuki, all candlelight and old-school spooky dignity.

On the other: Yorn, Brenda, Pierre, Butch, Barnaby—a group with no obvious unifying principle beyond wounded pride, escalating weirdness, and the vague feeling that everyone there had at some point made a room more difficult.

For the first ten minutes, it was rough.

Brenda tried to start a conversation about film noir and existential dread.
Barnaby interrupted twice with stories about sea curses that turned out to be mostly about socks.
Butch stared into the fire long enough that Yorn briefly worried he was doing accounting in his head.
Pierre, having apparently decided the emotional thesis of the evening was alienation, began acting out Casablanca entirely by himself near the bookshelf.
None of it cohered.

Across the room, the traditionally scary gathering continued with deeply irritating smoothness.

At one point Yorn heard Philip say, “The problem with modern depictions of skeletons is that they’re all surface and no interior life,” and Ramses answered, “Exactly,” as if that were a sentence people said all the time.

Yorn sat back in his chair and watched his own counter-programming curdle in real time.

This had not been his vision.

He had imagined solidarity.
Recognition.
A category.

Instead he had assembled a pirate, a cowboy accountant, a mime, Brenda, and himself into what currently felt like the least coherent support group in town.

Brenda noticed his face first.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You’re doing disappointment.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

Barnaby squinted at him. “Lad, what exactly was the intended theme here.”

Yorn hesitated.

Then, because there was no point pretending otherwise, he admitted it.

“I thought,” he said, “that if I wasn’t traditionally scary, then maybe I could have a gathering for… I don’t know. People who are scary in some other way.”

Butch considered that.

Barnaby scratched his beard.

Brenda pointed at herself. “I’m not scary.”

Yorn looked at her. “You once made a grown man cry over his take on Kubrick.”

“That was justified.”

Pierre nodded emphatically.

Butch leaned forward in his chair, hat shadowing his eyes just enough to make him briefly look more dangerous than anyone had given him credit for.

“Well,” he said, “I reckon you’re lookin’ at this wrong.”

Yorn frowned. “How.”

Butch gestured around the room.

“You’re tryin’ to make a category out of people who don’t belong in one.”

“That’s the issue.”

“No,” Butch said. “That’s the point.”

That landed more than Yorn expected.

Brenda sat up a little straighter. Barnaby stopped rummaging for a flask. Even Pierre lowered his invisible cigarette long enough to listen.

Butch went on.

“None of us are traditional anything. That’s why we live here.”

Barnaby thumped one hand against his knee. “Aye.”

Brenda pointed between herself and Pierre. “I mean, he’s a mime.”

Pierre spread both hands modestly.

“And you,” Brenda said to Butch, “are a cowboy accountant.”

Butch tipped his hat once. “Certified.”

Barnaby spread his arms. “And I be a pirate tavern owner in a mountain town.”

Yorn looked toward the couch, then back at his side of the room.

“And I’m a yeti journalist.”

Brenda smiled. “Exactly. This isn’t the non-traditionally scary group. It’s the what even are we group.”

“That’s worse,” said Yorn.

“That’s better,” said Barnaby.

And somehow, from there, it started to work.

Because once the theme stopped being “prove that Yorn belonged somewhere spooky” and became “remember that everyone in Snowdrift Bay is bizarre in their own very specific direction,” the room loosened.

Brenda brought up the time they had all ended up trapped in the library during that surprise municipal inspection.
Pierre immediately launched into a mime recreation of crawling through stacks and discovering a cursed scroll in the biography section.
Barnaby shouted, “Aye! And I taught sea shanties in reference!”
Butch, who had apparently also been there, nodded thoughtfully and said, “I remember readin’ cowboy haiku to keep folks calm.”

Brenda stared at him. “You write cowboy haiku?”

Butch shrugged. “‘Moonlit prairie still / Auditor knocks on the door / Hide the receipts fast.’”

There was a beat.

Then Yorn laughed.

A real laugh this time.

Pierre clutched his chest as if wounded by beauty.
Barnaby slapped the arm of his chair.
Even Elara, from the couch, turned slightly to listen.

The room softened after that.

Not neatly.
Not all at once.

But enough.

Stories started crossing the room. Oyuki drifted over at some point because Barnaby’s tale about a cursed compass had captured her interest. Ramses joined in when Butch mentioned a client who tried to deduct a ceremonial goat. Philip, despite himself, ended up watching Pierre’s mime version of Casablanca with genuine critical investment. Elara moved from her original seat and settled onto the arm of Yorn’s chair, one hand resting lightly against his shoulder as if to say, without saying it, you see?

And Yorn did see.

That he had not been excluded from scary.
He had just been trying too hard to fit himself into someone else’s category when Snowdrift Bay had never once asked anyone to do that.

Eventually, cups were emptied, dessert was eaten, and the room became what the best Snowdrift Bay nights always became: a pile of strange people laughing too hard in a house that had long since stopped asking whether any of this was normal.

At one point Brenda lifted her teacup.

“To being weird in incompatible directions.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Barnaby.

Butch raised his own mug. “To highly specific forms of menace.”

Pierre stood and silently mimed receiving an award for collective oddness.

Philip, after a moment, lifted his glass too. “To the fact that none of us fit the genre.”

Elara smiled. “That’s why it works.”

Yorn looked around the room—at the vampire, the mummy, the ghost, the skeleton, the pirate, the cowboy accountant, the mime, Brenda, all of them glowing in candlelight and conversation and total mutual absurdity—and felt the last of his earlier sting drain out of him.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think it does.”

By the time people started filtering out, the night had lost whatever categories it began with.

Brenda paused in the doorway and turned back with her coat half on.

“This was deeply weird,” she said. “I enjoyed it immensely.”

Barnaby nodded. “Next time I’ll bring grog.”

Butch tipped his hat. “I’ll bring pie and unclear emotional support.”

Pierre gave Yorn a solemn little salute, then mimed opening a door and inviting everyone back through it again.

After they were gone and the house had gone quieter, Yorn stood for a moment in the warm flickering living room while Elara came up beside him.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” he replied.

She slipped one arm through his.

“You’re not traditionally scary.”

Yorn groaned. “I know.”

Elara smiled. “You are, however, extremely specific.”

He looked at her.

“That may be the nicest insult you’ve ever given me.”

“It wasn’t an insult.”

“No?”

“No,” she said. “It was an invitation.”

And in Snowdrift Bay, where no one fit the proper category for very long, that turned out to be better than being scary anyway.