Raven Running: Beyond Seven Hungers: Book 3, An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Raven Marked) by Morgan Quaid & Josh Gersh

Author:Morgan Quaid & Josh Gersh [Quaid, Morgan & Gersh, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Ether Press
Published: 2024-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

13. Chaos Reigns

Raven stomped through the passageway, enraged and looking for any way to enact petty revenge on the Adversary and the organization the sorcerer served.

The passage led to another set of stone doors, their surface covered in an intricate scene, a city Raven didn’t recognize which looked as though it had been bisected by a raging river whose waters reached out threateningly as it forced its way through the landscape.

Two bird-like figures stood prominently on either side of the river, one with wings unfurled, struggling to free itself from the ravenous waters smothering its body from the waist down, pinning the creature in place as it tried to flee. The second bird creature was portrayed standing motionless on the opposite side of the river bank, eyes hard, wings wrapped around its shoulders like a cloak.

The doors opened ahead of Raven, revealing the familiar streets of Dusk, but not as they had been in her youth, nor as they were now in the wake of the Fae uprising. Raven felt her legs moving of their own will, carrying her out into the twilight city, its dour buildings choked by thick black rot with an emerald sheen, a sickly sludge that throbbed and undulated from the ground.

Here and there the streets and buildings were clear of the sickly, mucus-like rot, but much of the city had succumbed. A stench of death and decay rose from the fetid slime. It bubbled and churned as Raven walked by, pushing itself towards her with languid aggression.

Raven looked around to find that everything the rot touched had been transformed, twisted, and shaped into monstrous organic hybrids. Things with too many eyes and misshapen limbs stumbled to and fro through the dark green muck. Some were still in the process of being transformed, swelling to bulbous proportions as their limbs and bodies were made and remade over and over. Organic and inorganic objects were fused and twisted beyond natural constraints, their forms warped into ghastly echoes of madness.

Raven’s stomach churned. It didn’t matter that none of this was real, her body still reacted as though she were physically here in the tortured remnants of a city under siege by liquid rot.

“What is this?” she said, bending down to inspect a small creature skittering along in slow motion beside her feet.

This is Chaos! The great evil which seeks to end all, to swallow the cosmos and devour without thought or reason.

The tainted creature shuffling along on the road had to fight against the gruesome constraints of its own misshapen body to make even the most meager progress. Tangled limbs scrambled over one another, barely managing to support its swollen abdomen as it fell, more than walked, forward. The creature’s back was clogged with thousands of tiny red eyes, fighting to free themselves from a landscape infested with welts and sores.

Have a care! Erebus warned. The rot destroys all that it touches. Entire worlds have been devoured by Chaos after just a single point of contact.

Raven stood, watching the tainted creatures shuffle away, leaving a sickly line of bubbling green slime in its wake.

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