Raven's Nest

[Κομμα]

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…"

"My soul will be carried away on a raven's wings"

Hundreds of thousands of crimson eyed crows glare down at you as you cross the threshold of this ravine. The rustling of wings is the only thing that you can hear at first. Slowly, you hear whispers. There are disembodied voices everywhere. Yet there’s no one there…

Each step you take doesn’t echo throughout this desolate place even though you happen to be stepping on loose rubble. You see incorporeal shapes appearing occasionally. Men, women and children, all of them looking equally lost. They seem to notice each other, but they can’t see you. As a crows soar up into the sky, one by one they disappear till you are the only one left standing there…

Why?

[Κομμα]

A chill that extended beyond his physical body crept through Skye at the very sight of this infernal place.

Whether it was or not, it felt to him like a weak spot, a slight rip in the fabric between worlds. The threads still held it shut, but they were weakening, and for how much longer they would hold was difficult to say. The sensation of this normally gave him a chill, in any world at all. He had experienced it a couple times even on the mundane Earth. One time in an alleyway in London in the early twentieth century, and once again even stronger in a dead patch of forest in the foothills of the Catskills in New York.

There, however, there was the comfort of knowing that his own could patch up the weak spots whenever they came close to tearing. Here, however, they didn't have domain.

Who, if anyone, could fix this place? Who would have wanted to come near it to fix it?

His footsteps were as silent as if he weren't in his physical body, and the strange, distorted figures that moved past him seemed to make equally little noise as they walked. Though they spoke; oh, they spoke. Pieces of echoing conversation fluttered to his ears like butterflies, but it was all distorted and jumbled nonsense by the time it reached him.

Skye was unsure what had even brought him here. This was precisely the reason he hadn't had any real interest in wandering the outer edges of the Realm: for all the oddities that lurked in its civilized areas, the thought of what even they would shun had turned his stomach more than a little. This place certainly lived up to some of his most terrible expectations.

The Sands behaved even more oddly here than even in the center of the realm, so oddly that he had been sorely tempted to toss his sandglass into the ravine below him lest he be tempted to glance at it again. They would stop and start, never reaching top or bottom, swirling about in some strange whirlpool at both ends of the small sandglass and unrelenting even when the device was turned on its side.

What bothered him more yet was that the sands also turned black here. Skye had never seen this happen and was unsure whether he had any interest in knowing what it meant.

Another chill ran through him as he came to eye level with one red-eyed crow perched on a jutting rock before him. For how much he despised crows on Earth, his hatred for those in this infernal place was tenfold at the very least. He ignored it and walked on for reasons he couldn't begin to explain, and he heard the flapping of the raven's wings as soon as it finished watching him pass.

This place was wrong. There was no other word for it; it was simply wrong and shouldn't have been.

[Rae]

The group had fallen silent as they walked. This place was so…wrong. Not right at all. And, amazingly, it had made the normally cheerful, and argumentative, comrades fall utterly silent. They could the wrongness of the air, felt like a physical presence, oppressive and domineering.

The eldest of the group and the next-to-youngest were in agreement that it felt like they were near Shadows. The other two thought it felt more like the Spire. Either way, it made them feel cold inside.

“I want to get out of here,” Hannah whispered as they walked, uncomfortable. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”

Sparrow wrapped an arm around her as they walked. He didn’t want to be there, either. But, realistically, he didn’t even know how they’d gotten there. Well, why would be a better term. Their collective Guild Seals had dragged them away from what they had been doing and plopped them down here. But that was history, now. The only question they could focus on was the reason and how to get out.

---

The woman ran, panicked, along the bank of the ravine. It was close now; she could feel it, even if she couldn’t see it. Anyone witnessing her, would have wondered how a blind woman could run so quickly in a cloak and dress without even having shoes on. She wouldn’t even have answered them had anyone asked, but still.

There wasn’t much time left. Or, maybe, it was the absence of Time in this place that had her so worried.

(Hope I got the ravine written okay.... *pictured a ravine with little banks on the side and then the walls...like in the Grand Canyon*)