[juky 11] drinks Arthur/Caleb

Caleb advances and the spirits seem to dart around him such that he can't really strike a blow. They taunt him, and as he advances, Caleb finds himself somewhere else. It's still the umbra, but no longer Arthur's shop. It looks to be a graveyard, full of ancient graves. The sky over it is orange and green, the ground red and black. The spirits here are a mix of wraith and corrupt eart and stone spirits, some death spirits, and they reach for him. Some fall to his daggers, sliced into ribbons of curling mist. Others grab at his arms and head, pulling him into an open grave. It's Caleb's turn to fall into blackness.

He lands heavily in an open plain of knee high lurid green grass that's waving gently in a breeze he doesn't feel. The sky is white with a black full moon hanging low near the horizon. In the distance he sees a black tower.

Caleb heads towards the tower. It's further away than it seems, and he feels like he's been walking for hours without it getting any closer. Along the way he encounters small spirits among the tall grass. They're wind spirits, chained to the earth below them. They sing, and provide the motion of the grass. Their song is sad, and it makes Caleb feels sad. He stops, and sits in the grass, looking st the tower in the distance. Suddenly it's looming over him, seemingly miles high, and the grass is over his head. The walls of the tower are rough, and the nearest opening four or five times Caleb's crinos height above him. There's also a hole at the base that goes deep into the earth.

It smells cold, and earthy, with just a little decay, a touch of death.

He hears a cawing, and looks up. On top of the massive door sits a raven, a spirit of memory. It looks down at him with beady eyes, tilts it s head.

The raven caws, flaps its wings, watches him. As Caleb climbs, he finds that each time he digs claw into the tower, he gets a flash of memory. Old ones at first. His childhood, his family, his brother. As he climbs higher, the flashes become more recent. Arthur, adventure, America, Teagan. He reaches the door, eye level with the raven, and he looks up, wondering...

The spirit ruffled its spirit feathers, and flew away. As it did, Caleb noticed one feather had shaken loose, and had caught in a crack in the stones just above the door. The door itself appears to be made of thick black glass. It's slick, with no apparent handle, only a small narrow slit in the centre.

The quill end is too thick, but when he rotates the feather, and tries the other end, it fits perfectly. He hears a loud click, and the door swings inwards, into a dark room. Inside, he can't see a thing, but can hear breathing like sounds, and lots of small movements. And a smell of rot and decay.

The darkness ahead seems absolute, until the door behind closes, and Caleb eyes begin to adjust. The rot here is rot of the earth, of living things breaking down organic matter to be food to worms and bugs and beetles. So many little feet. And the breathing seems to be the room itself, the lungs of the earth. There's nothing to fight here, nothing attacks. The passage is long, though, and as he moves forward, the passage seems to get narrower. It's not long before he's pushing through piles and mounds of crawling living things to get where he's going. They're all over him, crawling in his ears, through his hair, getting inside his clothes.

He pushes through, and bursts out a hole in the earth in the middle of Central Park. It's night. The sky is red, and the stars a weird purple above. On the lawn not far away is a woman doing martial arts katas.

The woman seems shocked that someone had spoken to her. She stops, turns to face him. She looks Asian, maybe Japanese. Long dark hair. As she turns, two long black,fans she was working with fold, and seem to vanish.

"What are you doing here?" She asks. "Have you come to help?"

She turns, and her form seems to shift strangely, like she's not really there. Her hair is like black silk, moving like water. Her face seems to flicker on and off within it.

"Leeches came. All were lost. But I go on and on and on and on .." Her voice echos in the empty park. She shifts into a black wolf, with three stripes on its forehead, which begins to dance across the bawn. You can feel it here. There are caerns nearby. The wolf dissolves into streamers of shadow, that rise into the red sky.

Behind Caleb, something calls. The Raven, it caws, and flaps its wings, leading him on. He sees banes, gathered around a campfire. They flow towards him....

Two came at him simultaneously. They looked like twisted and corrupted wolves, or what remained of them. They spread out to flank him, coming at him from either side.



Three lesser spirits moved at him from directly in front, but they were hanging back, waiting.

Caleb stands his ground, Klaives at the ready. The left one attacks first, going for his arm ...

He slices through the chest of the first one, the pieces falling to each side. The one on the right closes, and receives a similar treatment. The others close, and Caleb feels overwhelmed. He can taste their corruption with each breath. His Klaives are covered with their ichor. Something just as dark, but differently alien appears behind them, rising up out of a wound in the ground. An impossibly large mouth opens and it devours three names with one bite. Then it advances on Caleb, and opens its mouth, and the world goes dark.

The darkness seems complete at first. Then you start to see some light coming from 'ahead'. And you see trees. They're dark and twisted, no leaves just branches. You see the raven. It sits in one of the trees. Behind them, a mountain rises like a massive natural pyramid, the top capped with snow. The path leading through the trees winds randomly, and is narrow. The first time you go to take a step off the path, the raven caws at hpyou, flapping it's wings until you are fully back on the path.

The raven simply caws, then launches on large dark wings and flaps away, only to discntegrate into wispy shadows and vanish soon after.

The path winds through the trees, becoming very narrow in places. One stretch is so narrow you have to place your feet carefully one in front of the other between the rows of white stones barely wide enough for your feet.

Off to one side you see a tombstone. Then another appears in the darkness behind it, then you suddenly notice as the liquid darkness parts that there are dozens lining both sides of the path between the trees. If you could only get a little closer, you might be able to read the inscriptions.

There's nothing close to the path to lean on. The trees and headstones are all just beyond reach. You think one of the nearby ones may have ... is it Molloy? It's so hard to make out in the darkness.