Ravenfell Chronicles: Origins

by Brand J. Alexander

  Despite a few disgruntled murmurs, the oily smoke of the pyres was blackening the sky over the village by early afternoon. However, as the bodies of their fallen sizzled and cracked disturbingly in the searing flames, an unnatural air was settling over the secluded little village. A mood of foreboding hung on almost every word and glistened in fearful glassy eyes. And the mad, blind, Golak continued to rant and rave about the spirits. He called Dorga out as a fraud as often as he could, while mysterious laughter accompanied his taunts. He called to the ravens almost lovingly. He spoke, nonstop, until his words rasped with the parched strain of unquenched thirst. The rambling litany grew to feel like a constant inescapable chant, an unceasing torment to mortal ears. And through it all, the ravens remained, watching their prisoners, taunting the humans with the threat of their fel magics.

  Nothing was going as planned. Yet, somehow, Dorga managed to maintain tepid obedience among the people. Whatever faith his miracles originally engendered from them was quickly fading as it became clear the new shaman was unable to banish the fiends threatening from the edges of the forest. However, his proven impotence against these foes was still not enough to break their fragile loyalty. The forces of death were too terrifying for the primitive villagers to choose any other fate. No one else was willing to stand against an enemy such as this. No one among them held knowledge of these forces the way the son of their shaman did. So, although, Dorga may not have been the protector they would’ve chosen, they accepted the sad fact he was all they had in this bleakest of times.

  As the sun’s last comforting rays slid beneath the dark, forbidding wall of the forest’s edge, an otherworldly chill settled over the village. It was an unnatural sensation, and it pervaded much more deeply than a simple cold. Those who voiced their complaints spoke of icy dread stiffening their limbs and the prickling chill of unseen fingers on their spine. There was an impermanence to the surroundings as if the slightest breeze could scatter the entire village to the night. And mysterious shadow figures hovered just on the edges of vision for many. So, even though emotions were high, and the hollow rasping words of Golak still haunted the night, the village gathered together in the open, around their warming fires, hoping to repel the haunting atmosphere with the closeness of others. But, what they sought for comfort would be their undoing.

  Tensions were already heated among the intermingled factions. Hope of survival prevented them from boiling over, so far. But the oppressive feel to the air and strange occurrences only grew through the late hours after midnight, and frightened people are easily manipulated. The initial catalyst was unclear at first. Yet as small arguments broke out among the gathered populace, the pattern grew evident. A supposed slight, heard by only a few, denied by others, spurred the first outbursts. The ghostly laughter, with no true source, fueled those heated words to fiery rage.

  Dorga almost felt relieved he wasn’t the only one taunted by the mysterious voices and laughter until he discerned the motive of their game. He tried to calm the people. He tried to silence the arguments and bring them back to their senses. But as the chaos grew, it was unclear who was truly hearing him and who was responding to whispers from beyond the grave.

  It was the loyalists who began the bloodshed. They, most of all, looked to the image of Dorga the Great to save them. Their salvation, they believed, relied on his survival. And as the unrest split the village into two opposing forces, they responded predictably to the inherent danger to their holy protector.

  Ivus’s ax split the head of the chieftain with the unexpected sound of a crushing melon. The brute of a man had been staring at the chieftain the whole night in silence, until that moment. Then, in a sudden fit of unexplained rage, he charged forward, as if meeting an army in battle, and swung. The chieftain’s wife screamed a horrifying shriek, but it ended in a sudden garbled grunt as the second swing of Ivus’s ax nearly rent her in two. There was nothing in Dorga’s conman playbook that could have stopped what happened next.

  If suffering and agony were to compose a symphony, the melody of its work could have reached no greater perfection than those hours between the chieftain’s death and dawn. When the grotesque chorus finally faded, Dorga’s brutal victory over his doubters was nearly complete. But this was a success he didn’t desire. The reward of so many deaths committed in his name wasn’t even bittersweet, he realized, as the bile rose to the back of his throat. When the first piercing rays of dawn sliced through the forest branches, the carnage was revealed in stark gruesome detail. A feastly offering awaited the ravens. Death wouldn’t go hungry this day. And, in turn, Dorga’s enemies would only grow stronger.

  In the horror of the moment, it almost didn’t register that the rasping words of Golak and his incessant laughter had ceased. An eerie silence hung over everyone and everything, their voices smothered by the oppressive closeness of the grave and the realization of what they’d done. Then, quite fittingly, the madman’s haunting laughter returned, more ghastly than before, as a macabre accompaniment to the revelation of their night’s deeds, lain bloodily bear before them.

  “You fools. You did their work for them. I see it now, so clearly.” The words were harsh, and he strained to speak around a tongue already grown black and bloated from the Raven’s Fel venom. Golak’s entire face, in fact, was blackened with the ichorish taint. The skin of his cheeks and neck were bulged and splitting in a heightened state of decay, but the blessed touch of death refused to relieve him from the pain of the experience. Yet, something held him in euphoric and quite vengeful bliss, despite his unsettling state. “I see souls, born from betrayal and untimely death. They glare at their murderers across a veil so thin it barely holds back their rage. The king of ravens bars their passage beyond. And he tells them to blame you, Dorga.”

  “Kill him already!” Drena demanded. She may have been cruel and unfeeling about many things, but she could take her husband’s taunting no longer. “Why must we listen to this madness another moment?” Dorga refused to answer.

  “He’s afraid to, dear, unfaithful wife. Blind to the forces aligned against him. My whispers alone hint at what fate the king of ravens holds for him. Besides, if he kills me, he knows none of his fake charms and magic potions will be able to protect him from my spirit’s wrath.” The prisoner broke off in a fit of gasping coughs.

  “You’re insane. The Raven’s Fel has consumed your mind,” Dorga denounced him, but his words held little force. Much of what Golak said was true. And the great conman could no longer think of a lie or story to disprove any of it. You couldn’t bend reality to your own ends if the boundaries of what was real were no longer definable.

  “Gathered souls from everywhere, all for your demise. But you. You and your heathens gave them more than needed, Dorga. None may leave to cross over. Not until the raven’s will is done. So many walk among you. The ground glows, bleeding ghostly vapors with every footstep of the dead.”

  The air felt as if it quivered with the spirit raven’s sudden, startling caw, but the piercing dread in that call proved this was no mere bird. The madman named a king of ravens, and if such a beast existed, it could only be this remarkably peculiar creature. The raven gleamed with such darkness he left a path of shadow in his wake, the black feathers practically consuming the falling rays of morning light around him. He alit upon the head of Golak, talons piercing fetid flesh for support.

  Golak didn’t flinch from the contact of the bird upon his brow and attempted a smile, though his flesh was beyond the feat of natural-seeming motion. “He brings death to you, Dorga. You can turn your eyes from its truths no longer.”

  With a savage snap, the bird severed the prisoner’s blackened tongue. It dropped the rotten flesh to the ground with disinterest, bordering on disdain. Its motive was clear. This was done to silence, not to feed or injure. Dorga would learn no more of the Raven King’s plan from the ramblings of a crazed blind man.

  It was an oddly timed choice. What good did silencing Golak, now, accomplish? There was no o
ne left alive in the village who could deny feeling the presence of their ghostly visitors all around them. The madman’s declaration, while terrifying to hear put into words, told them nothing their preternatural senses weren’t already screaming at them. All of reality seemed poised on a precipice, teetering into a chasm of the horrifying and unimaginable. The truth that their world was descending into madness needed no narrator to tell them what they already knew at their very core. But the madman’s chants, the torturous cadence of his ranting, was more frightening than the truths he ever revealed or the new silence of his maiming. Or so Dorga thought.

  It began as a gurgling gasping fit. Surely the man was dying at last, Dorga reasoned. The thought was somehow both relieving and concerning at the same time. As the prisoner’s strength recovered from the shock of the injury, the reprehensible noises became clearer. Golak was laughing. He was choking as well, as clotted blood and gore clogged his airways, but his chest spasmed as if given over to uncontrollable fits of mirth.

  Golak’s gruesome bubbling cackle was stomach-churning, to say the least, but the gravelly croaking laughter of the Raven King, which followed, chilled the very soul. He raised wings as if to fly, but it was more signal than threat. For a small detachment of his raven flock left the trees as if beckoned, to join their regal feathered monarch.

  Unlike their lord, however, they did not alight upon the prisoner with any form of grace or decorum. They fell upon the strung up carrion with gluttonous exuberance, their beaks tearing at still living flesh before they even set down. They feasted, with ravenous hunger, as their victim laughed in nightmarish accompaniment. And through it all, the king of ravens perched at the very pinnacle of grotesquery, glaring across the distance to where Dorga desperately sought a route of escape. But there was nowhere he could run that could shield him from such beings. Whatever grievance this spirit creature held, it wouldn’t give up easily.

  “Why do you taunt me, demon bird? What do you want from me?”

  The king of ravens raised its midnight wings to the sky once more as its beak split the air with a piercing caw in answer. If they were once teetering upon a precipice, Dorga knew, this was the last push over and the inevitable fall. Reality seemed to shudder at the cry, as he felt the world swallowed into oblivion. The seeming impermanence to the village grew imminently fragile, and he could sense the laws of the physical realm twisting under the molding claws of the Raven King. It was the most frightening thing Dorga ever beheld, and yet he couldn’t turn away.

  The sun vanished, its light eclipsed, swallowed into the dark glint of the Raven King’s eye. The sky turned black as pitch without its presence, for no stars remained to mar the swathe of gaping emptiness beyond. The branches of the surrounding forest clawed their way into the sky above, chasing the shadowy mantle with predatory stealth, growing faster than any tree could possibly grow. The village was overtopped in moments, a cavernous skeletal prison built by unnatural means.

  Dorga expected to hear the frantic explosion of fear and panic from the villagers. What he heard, instead, was more fitting for the curse which had befallen him. They began to laugh. Everyone, from everywhere, was laughing at him and his futile attempt to be more than a failure. “This is your fate for seeking to be greater,” the message seemed to resonate unbidden within his soul. You grasped for too much, and now you shall be brought low.

  Chapter 6:

  The Raven King Comes

  There’s a secret known only by the dead, and the few, who like the Raven King, share in such forbidden mysteries. The more spirits gathered in a place, the more energy they expel into the surrounding area. Souls are substance freed from a vessel, and their essence inherently bleeds out into their surroundings, the longer they remain within the physical realm. A single spirit, or several, and the land may take on an occasional eerie chill. Whispers may carry on the winds between worlds. But when death piles up in a single place, like a battlefield, or charnel house, the spiritual energy is more palpable, the supernatural occurrences more substantial and threatening. And it was this clever trick the king of ravens wrought upon the small village.

  Dorga and his manipulations may have caused the deaths, but the Raven King and his court were the ones who made sure none of the victims’ spirits passed on. They remained prisoners, their essence bleeding out into the surroundings and twisting the boundaries of reality for the Raven King to work his will.

  The spirits were driven to move on, the natural order of the universe driving their essence to heed the call, pulling them across the veil and into the land of death where they belong. Yet their pathways through the veil to the Netherworld were blocked by the raven’s trickery. Their need, denied, was almost magnetic in nature. It pulled inexorably, desperately, towards the final destination barred them. And as the land itself became infused with ghostly energy, the entire village seemed to stretch from the realm of life to heed the summons of the beyond.

  The Netherworld is a hungry, relentless force. It was drawn to embrace those bound fragments of mortality, but the veil prevented its full advance. Like a sentient thing, death pressed closer against the realm of the living, a beast sniffing and clawing at the doors to get inside. Dorga could feel its oppressive presence like an icy breath upon his neck. His hair stood on end with the certainty of an attack, imminent yet unseen. The land of the dead roiled stronger, closer with every second, perhaps a fingerbreadth away from their own, with only the tenuous boundary, mystics called the veil, preventing it from embracing them all completely. And there was nothing Dorga could do to stop it.

  Dorga was skilled at ignoring many things to maintain the cool demeanor of the position he pretended to hold, but his thoughts were frayed, and any control he may have held was long since forgotten. He desperately wanted it all to stop, especially the laughter. Everyone was laughing, even Drena. Her cruel ridicule bit deep. He cared very little for the woman, yet something about her betrayal was more than he could withstand. He demanded she cease. She laughed in his face. Control disappeared quickly into a maddened rage.

  He grabbed Drena by the throat, dragging her close. She clearly didn’t perceive the level of her danger, for she didn’t fight. No one would come to help her, even now. She was an outsider. Yet still, she laughed. He squeezed, more than just a threat. She gagged and choked for air, only briefly. Then, she laughed once more. He drove his fingers deeper into the gristly tissue of her windpipe, damaging vital parts, seeking to silence her mockery. Her eyes did not turn from his as they drained of life. Yet still, she laughed. Even when he released her body to lay by his feet with eyes glazed over and face tinged blue, her laughter only faded into hollow echoes. Death was too close now for even murder to silence the taunting.

  Dorga drew a knife from his robes, consumed with madness. He drove it into Drena’s chest, a final attempt to stop just one person from laughing at him. He struck her again and again in frantic repetition. Scarlet blossomed from her stiffened purple lips as the blood frothed with her continued gurgling offense. It wouldn’t stop. Even in death, she wouldn’t stop.

  The laughter only grew as the village voices rose to a roar. He looked up from the woman’s mangled corpse. The faces of all he knew stood before him, living and dead. All of them were laughing. Dorga screamed, trying to drown them out, but nothing would stop the nightmare unless he could kill that vile raven and end its curse for good. He turned to face his foe. And as he met the gleaming eyes of the Raven King, the laughter suddenly stopped.

  The silence was not complete, however, for one voice carried even through the standoff if such a sound could be called a voice. Golak’s gurgling laughter had risen to hysterics as the birds savaged his flesh. His legs hung in tatters, numerous bones exposed, where the flesh had been consumed. Much of what remained was barely recognizable, and even more was hidden by the frantically flapping wings. Yet still, his torturous, haunting laughter continued. And perched atop it all, the Raven King waited, daring Dorga to act.

  He raised his knif
e, still slick with Drena’s blood, and charged the gruesome totem of mortal suffering, determined to dethrone the beast from its regal seat. Every step of his sprint brought him further into crazed bloodlust. This spirit creature represented everything that prevented Dorga from obtaining all he deserved. The rage of an entire lifetime’s disappointments and failures was directed with all of its vengeance and desperation into that attack. He cared no longer about the fel taint of the birds’ deadly bites. His mind was lost to all rational thought beyond ending this nightmare and stopping the laughter.

  He met the enemy with flailing strikes and savage fury. By then, he was little more than a mindless berserker striking out at anything before him. Bird or man made little difference at that point. Everything was his enemy, and he faced them all with crazed and murderous intent. The ravens screamed, the madman laughed, and Dorga howled louder with every piercing assault. His attack was too much for the bindings, though, which had already borne three days of the prisoner’s weight and struggles.

  The ropes, which held Golak, snapped. The entire mass of writhing forms fell to the earth in a heap of savaged flesh and crumpled black feathers. Golak’s laughter finally ceased. In fact, every sound suddenly stopped. With the fall of the Raven King, the entire village was locked in a suspenseful otherworldly silence.

  Dorga’s rage withered away like a flame deprived of air. The maddening laughter was gone at last. He should feel relieved. But the dead stillness of the world around him held the feel of a tomb. Whatever peace his attack may have won was revealed as a farce by the chilling pall of dread which descended over him. He backed away from the carrion heap warily. This wasn’t over.