You know at first I did not want to stick cow teeth to beeswax candles. I wanted to tie people to chairs in-front of a feast with metal wires in their mouth and than tighten the wires until their jaws snapped, than let that sit until they died of blood loss or thirst. Imagine finding a hall full of skeletons with broken jaws sitting bound before a feast. Their flesh and organs a brown mush on the floor, the whole thing covered in spiderwebs and stinking like a landfill. I am sure it would have been upsetting.
I could not justify the expense. Doing something just for the esthetics does not get you a budget for 8 kidnappings and buying a building with a ball room. It gets you a psychic evaluation. Getting fired for being sick in the head really puts a damper on your access to paranormal resources. The demons I have contacted for my art project were willing to provide, but their rates were just to high. Sure it would have looked great, but it is not worth 130 days of servitude.
I needed to scale down. Getting cow bones and especially teeth is just cheaper if you can source loyally. During October most butchers don't even look at you funny once you drop the words "Halloween" and "Decoration". Doing it with about 10 gave me a very usable sample.
Now for the bees wax candles I had a different problem. I needed bees wax not 50% bees wax or just paraffin with yellow die. The process cares for the ingredients. Butter is not the same as olive oil. I am making art here. You have to learn through pain, failure a master with a sharp tung and even sharper whip, days without sleep, a full months of nothing but formula books for entertainment and you own blood smeared across a cave wall.
Cows are herbivores that live their life from birth to death in servitude. Their ancestors were enslaved multiple generations back and they are if not happy content.
Bees are similar, yet a bee hive chooses its keeper. The honey and wax are produced in abundance and no bee had to die for the exchange of material for protection. Bees are eusocial insects with every piece working for the whole. Even the queen is nothing more than a reproductive organ to the colony. They all are enslaved to the swarm, yet the swarm is free.
A candle is the enslavement of fire. The reaction of fuel and oxidizer, exothermic, has no mind to think yet for all of human history we treated it as if it were alive, a protector and a vengeful destroyer. Every fire lit by a match or with a lighter is new to this world, yet all fire is always fire. A connection going back to the creation of the universe when the first hydrogen burned into helium. So much history and power and we sell a device that can bring it forth for a few cents. The extraordinary becoming mundane.
A butcher has cow teeth, they are normal to them and mostly just garbage after what we really wanted was taken by force from a living being. Yellow candles made from things willingly traded by a swarm are normal. Fire, the thing the universe is build on and in a lesser form was responsible for enabling a hairless ape to rise above all others and finally enable the ape to kill all live on earth, is normal and cheep.
Printing the teeth to a nuclear bomb would have worked better for my purposes, but the whole budget thing extends to my access to nuclear fire as well.
Artificial demons are always a gamble for those desperate enough to call on powers that are new yet are meant to look and function as if they were old. If you use paraffin they are more connected to the dead plants or the earth than to a process. It makes them lazy. Human, canine, feline, equine or artificial teeth get a mind of their own. In the best case their ideas align with yours, in the worst case they are not happy about even being born. Angry toddlers is what you get. Pigs are to smart for their on good while sheep are to dumb. Fish, shark and wale is almost always not worth the effort. Octopi or bird beaks if I would use if I could, but alas I am on a time crunch. Cows will have to do.
And finally fire. Of all elements to employ for demons fire and lightning can do great things yet I always hesitate around them. Lightning has something to prove but no backing. Its exclusion from the classic four has always held it back. It is like fire an agent of order, sorting the chaos. In the end there is no more benzyl, sucrose or flesh there is ash. Yet their order brings chaos as every being of complexity flees from the pain of becoming lesser, getting closer to eternity and deviating.
On the day of spirits and ghosts I will make another work of art. I am sure by now the eggheads have run the numbers, with slack jawed faces realized they should not have corporate fire me and are currently trying to get people with guns to my position. I have cooked up a fine feast and the wires are also ready. I can practically here them shouting: Why was he not exercised properly? Who thought setting a demonologist on fire was a good idea especially if psychoanalysis showed sever mental degradation? Do you want to tell me someone cracked immortality while being absolutely high on caffeine, sugar and
a piece of the laughing one stuck in his skull?
My patron granted me room, my former employer granted me guests and the wonders of humanity granted me fire.
Twelve candles with cow teeth rammed into than at strange angles burn each one on a chair surrounded by copper wire. At the head of the table sits a burned man with his skeletal fingers clutching a peace of chard paper.
Happy Halloween
PS You are fired XD
Twelve more skeletons would join him around the table and twelve new demons would be born of fire, wax and teeth come November first.
