"Nightmare Eater" by Silvatiicus Riddle
Some words carry shadows with them. Grimalkin is one of those — an archaic term for a cat, yes, but more specifically, a witch’s familiar: a creature both companion and curse, a predator in the shape of a guardian. That’s the figure haunting the edges of Nightmare Eater, by Silvatiicus Riddle.
Recently published in Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, Nightmare Eater is told in the voice of a spirit — perhaps a daemon, perhaps something older — bound to protect a dreaming sorcerer. It lives on the border between myth and hunger, loyalty and consumption. And like the Grimalkin it evokes, the poem moves with a quiet intensity. It doesn’t pounce. It prowls.
Riddle’s use of imagery is striking and effective. Phrases like “dried and twisted necks,” “heat-fogged panes,” and “catacombs dark and seeming” build a gothic dreamscape that feels deeply liminal — a place suspended between sleep and wakefulness, protection and danger. There’s a sense of motion through thresholds, of slipping past the edges of ritual into something primal and barely contained.
The poem’s syntax mimics this effect. Its lines are lush but controlled, often looping in strange rhythms that echo the logic of dreams. One particularly memorable passage describes the narrator’s emergence:
“from a day’s waking-slumber to feast / upon the dried and twisted necks / of the daemons…”
The effect is disorienting in the best way — we’re never quite sure whether the speaker is a noble guardian or a monstrous thing barely held back by binding magick. Riddle plays with this tension throughout, never tipping fully in one direction.
A refrain repeats: “for in me there is a catacombs, dark, and seeming…”
This line becomes an anchor in the poem, a subtle inversion of traditional gothic horror. Rather than being haunted by external forces, the speaker is the haunting. The labyrinth is internal. The nightmare doesn’t live in the shadows beyond the salt circle — it lives within the one meant to defend against them.
This is where Nightmare Eater succeeds most — not simply as a mood piece, but as a character study. The narrator isn’t just a mysterious voice; they’re a presence with history, obligation, and an ambiguous nature shaped by arcane purpose. The Grimalkin becomes a metaphor for the cost of service, the fine line between devotion and devouring.
In just a few stanzas, Riddle weaves together folklore, gothic horror, and psychological unease. There are notes of Ligotti in the tone, of ancient familiar spirits from witchcraft traditions, and even echoes of the daemonologia — where binding a spirit is never quite the same thing as mastering it.
The final question Nightmare Eater leaves us with is the one it never asks outright:
What happens to something made to consume fear — when there are no more nightmares left to eat?
It’s an elegant, eerie poem — one that lingers well beyond the final line.
Recommended for readers of dark fantasy, occult verse, and anyone who suspects that not all protectors are safe.
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