Ravenfell Chronicles: Origins
Complete Collection
Brand J. Alexander
Copyright © 2021 Brand J. Alexander
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
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By Brand J. Alexander
(Novels)
Tears of Hatsunae
Rise of Tears
Fall of Tears
(Novella Series)
Guardians of the Tide
Moonrise’s Call
Call of the Rising Deep
(Short Stories)
Ravenfell Chronicles: Origins
The Peculiar Raven
The Raven’s Fel
The Rise of a Matriarch
Dark Heart of Ravenfell
or
Ravenfell Chronicles: Origins
(Complete Collection)
I began Ravenfell Manor Yard Haunt in 2010, and it has continued to grow over the years. One lesson I learned is that the best haunts always have a back story. The Legend of Ravenfell Manor is the first story I wrote about the Ravenfell Family and the yard haunt I produce annually for Halloween. In a way, it is the prologue for what comes after. So, it is only fitting that the origin stories of the family begin with the story that started it all.
The Legend of Ravenfell Manor
It was a secret kept so well that no one alive knew of its existence. Those who lived within the small farming community had never heard of a place called Ravenfell Manor. There was no reason anyone should have, for it hadn’t been standing or even spoken of in almost two hundred years. But the memory of that dark forgotten place had been biding its time and building in power for nearly two centuries, and it was ready to rise again.
Long before this sleepy little community came into being, the land for as far as the eye could see was nothing but fields and a few secluded farmhouses. Yet, nestled in a small copse of dark tangled woods stood a foreboding manor house quite different from any other.
Few knew of its existence, though some of the farmers in the surrounding area whispered of its inhabitants. The Ravenfells were a reclusive family, so no one ever truly knew how many of them lived there or even when they took up residence there, to begin with. However, everyone who knew of them claimed that they were practitioners of the Dark Arts.
Harvest time during festivals and markets abounded with stories of the beastly horrors witnessed by the farmers who gathered the crops near that ghastly abode. And there were some years when a few unfortunate farmhands never returned at all. At first, no one dared to uncover whether the stories were true, but as years passed, the proof became difficult to ignore.
Strange, terrifying creatures started to roam the lands at night, terrorizing the countryside. Rumors held that master Beaumont Ravenfell was at the root of the rampaging fiends. Believed to be a powerful warlock, he was said to conjure demons from the underworld and captured strange and monstrous beasts from distant lands, and brought them back for his collection.
Yet the lord of the manor wasn’t the only one blamed for strange happenings. His wife, Lady Katerina Ravenfell, was accused of being a sorceress of great prowess who spent her time tending gardens filled with vile plants of unknown origins. She was blamed for the swarms of vermin and insects, which claimed the harvests and desecrated acres of land for generations. But like with her husband, her deadliest hobbies had a habit of escaping from the manor grounds.
Occasionally, strange carnivorous weeds and flowers would sprout up in the fields of unsuspecting farmers. Pets and livestock were often the unfortunate victims, but a few of her creations were known to take large children at times. Whether they were seeds carried by the wind or planted with malicious intent, no one ever knew for certain. But neither option made it any less lethal. Some even whispered that the mistress raised mysterious pumpkins, which could trap the souls of her victims and twist them into demonic vegetative servants, bound completely to her will for eternity.
Terrified by the endless horrors, the local populace eventually reached a breaking point. They gathered together, like most mobs do, and set the surrounding fields of the manor aflame. It took nearly a week for the inferno to die down. The howling flames burned deathly black across the grove of woods and the manor, casting a shadow across the horizon even at highest noon. It was an unquenchable raging force, unlike any natural blaze. When it was finished, nothing remained of the Ravenfells or the darkness they had spawned there.
There was uncertainty among those who purged the evil, though, a fear that perhaps they hadn’t cleansed it from the world completely. But even as some warned of possible vengeance, it was decided that the deed should be erased from memory, whether victory or folly. It was done. Nothing could change that or likely stop any reprisal that might be coming. So, to hide their shame and avert any blame should the Ravenfells return, those who participated swore to never speak of it again, and the history of Ravenfell Manor was lost to the world through the passage of time.
However, on All Hallows Eve, over the years, some people claim to have seen strange things lurking where the manor once stood. Although, no one living knows of the history or the location’s significance any longer. Perhaps if they had remembered, they could have done something to stop it. They could have cautioned against treading those defiled grounds. For the fires so long ago, as those few wise voices feared, did not purge the land entirely of the Ravenfells’ dark magic.
Over the centuries, the evil of the Ravenfells has slumbered, gaining in strength, only ever lightly touching our world when the veil which stands between them and return is weakest on Halloween night. The town now stands where the cornfields once spread endlessly, and a housing development has built up around the old property of the Ravenfells. Unfortunately for the inhabitants, one house now stands in the exact center of the ancient forgotten manor. Few families ever make it past autumn living in that house, and those who live in the neighborhood whisper that it is cursed. Little do they know how right they are.
The Peculiar Raven
Chapter 1:
The Light of Discovery
They always thought him a Peculiar Raven as far back as he could remember. And he could easily imagine those judgmental black eyes staring at his egg with the same disdain and revulsion, which he received so often now that he was grown. But in all honesty, there wasn’t really anything ravens didn’t look upon in some manner of judgment or another, especially when it came to the first and most important judgment any raven makes, food or not food.
Food was where the Peculiar Raven differed from the other gluttonous heathens of his flock. Whether or not he could eat something wasn’t always the first thing he asked. He had a curious mind, which for a raven wasn’t altogether unusual. But his curiosities often diverged from the normal habits of ravens. Sometimes, the Peculiar Raven was interested in what the things he ate did before they got dead enough to be things he could eat. Of course, this was a horrible offense among his kind. They were regal ravens standing above all other creatures and only showing interest when those lower beings died and became worth noticing, or at least worth eating. They were arrogant birds, though truly they didn’t deserve to be.
This was another place where the Peculiar Raven differed from his flock mates. They were slovenly and ill-kempt
. They were practically as disgusting as vultures, and those heathens couldn’t even have feathers on their heads because of their horrible dinner manners. Yet, they dared call themselves regal. Of course, the Peculiar Raven had actually seen the kings among beasts, not just when they were bloated with rot and insects, but when they were alive in their regal state. He understood his flock was far from what they thought of themselves. He didn’t scorn them for it. But he did wish he could change it, make them better. But they did scorn him for his differences, the very differences he thought to gift to them, to show them a better way.
When he daintily pecked at the carrion, tearing away bits so as not to get the filth all over, they taunted him and dove headfirst into the feast, gorging until they dripped with ichor down to their gizzards. As he preened away anything which got onto his feathers until they gleamed even in the sunlight with the dark of midnight, they bumped up against him, rubbing their offal onto his freshly cleaned feathers. It was this supposedly regal behavior that eventually drove the Peculiar Raven to become even more peculiar.
To avoid the constant torment, he chose to sit and wait within the branches of the trees until the rest of his flock was completed with their gluttony and then descend to feed as daintily as he liked, alone and unmolested. As chance would have it, this very unravenlike behavior is what led to a discovery that would change the destiny of not only himself but all raven kind.
The Peculiar Raven couldn’t count how many feasts he stood by watching as the rest of the birds fed. He never kept track. But whatever the number, or the array of factors required for this miraculous moment to happen, when it occurred, it caught his attention immediately.
The current food was one of the pink fleshy human things from a local tribe. He had collapsed and died of starvation, or so it appeared. But there was plenty of meat still on his bones for a flock of hungry ravens. Without the slightest hesitancy, the flock dove in to feed, while the Peculiar Raven took up a place in a nearby tree to wait. Had he not been positioned just right, he might have missed it completely. But fate was on the Peculiar Raven’s side.
It was just a glint of light. Most everyone else would have discounted it and continued with their day. But this was a raven mind, and shiny takes a special place in their psyche. Not only that, but it was the Peculiar Raven’s mind, and his curiosity was peaked in his current boredom by the faint glimmer as it appeared to escape from the suddenly no longer twitching carrion. The others of the flock were too intent on feeding to notice. But the Peculiar Raven was immediately obsessed.
He flitted down from the treetop on sleek midnight wings to the brush at the edge of the clearing, where he last saw the dancing light. But he was too slow. He caught just a hint of the gleam out of the corner of his eye, just before the world around it appeared to blur and ripple. By the time his avian head cocked sideways to peer closer, the light and the disturbance that took it was gone. But their memory was locked into the Peculiar Raven’s mind. This knowledge was a food he craved above all others, food for his mind. And the Peculiar Raven suddenly felt ravenous.
Days and weeks passed as the Peculiar Raven waited in the trees watching the corpses and bloated carrion with new resolve. But whatever circumstances led to that first discovery, they didn’t realign themselves for his pleasure. But he didn’t simply watch and wait. The Peculiar Raven had grown a bit obsessive about this concept, and so he sat mulling the idea over, trying to work it out as he waited and watched for something, anything, to change.
What if the light was that human creature’s life, the Peculiar Raven wondered one day. He didn’t have a name or even a concept for a soul, but the fact that something might be inside that meat bag one moment, giving it life, and then gone the next, didn’t seem altogether improbable. Unfortunately, this thought didn’t ease his obsession but made it even worse. What would it be like to feed on the essence of its life instead of the leavings of its death, the Peculiar Raven couldn’t help but consider hungrily.
It took a few more weeks to formulate a theory. The reason he was being denied a second appearance was that the food since that fateful day was too dead. He needed something not only fresh but maybe not quite dead yet. And he needed a human. Something in his mind told him their lights were brighter for some reason. It was only a hunch, but it felt right. It was why he could see the light when a human died, but not when he swallowed a living frog whole, for instance.
With all his theories and plotting devised, the Peculiar Raven decided the only way to see a human as they die and release their life essence was to leave his flock and go find some humans. Those creatures were always killing each other over something. And when they weren’t doing it themselves, the diseases and animals they hunted took a fair share of lives as well. So, as his filthy family and friends gorged on an all too dead pile of fetid tissue, the Peculiar Raven slipped away to seek a place of humans, and without knowing it, a new destiny.
Chapter 2:
The Mentor
It didn’t take long for the Peculiar Raven to find a camp of humans. They weren’t hard to find. Everywhere they went, they left signs of their passing as they changed the world to suit them. That skill alone drew the raven’s attention and curiosity. And he quickly became as enamored with the strange ways they lived their lives as he would be a shiny object. But he didn’t come to watch humans cook meat or carve wooden weapons. He wanted the secret of the light from them. Fortunately, out of all the animal hide tents in the camp, one was permeated with the scent and essence of death so thick the Peculiar Raven could spot it from several miles off, like a dead herd of animals piled up buffet style after a flood.
He found a convenient perch near the rickety abode, decorated with so many skulls and bones it might as well be a picked clean corpse itself. But that wasn’t the only corpselike thing in the vicinity. The old man who lived within this charnel house looked quite the part of a corpse himself. He was an old decrepit shambling bag of bones, with frail sagging skin and joints, which ached and swelled so much, the Peculiar Raven could hear the popping and cracking of them from his perch, high up in the tree.
He was quite alive, of course, despite being close to death’s door in years. He was grumpy and irascible, and the raven grew fond of his tirades and angry grunting explosions even though he couldn’t completely understand all of it after weeks of watching. But despite the affection for the old coot’s performance, the Peculiar Raven was most interested in the man’s past time. He was a tender of his people’s dead, a shaman of sorts.
This, in itself, intrigued the Peculiar Raven. Dead was always just the end of most creature’s usefulness beyond being food. Yet this old man didn’t eat the bodies of his people when they were presented on a table before him. He cleaned them and rubbed them with scented oils. He spoke to them tenderly, despite his grumpy exterior. He prepared them, and then he interred them in the earth, where the beak of a hungry raven couldn’t peck out their eyes and feed on their tastiest bits. All of this was fascinating enough to the Peculiar Raven, but there was something else that the old shaman did besides tend the bodies. He tended their lifeforce, or souls, as the raven would later learn they were called.
The Peculiar Raven came seeking the secret of the humans’ glimmering light, but what he ended up finding was the beginning secrets of death. Death was a concept he never really thought on too much before this. Dead was food. And despite his inherent curiosity, that strong lesson in his traditional raven upbringing always overrode any other wandering thought on the matter, until now. Death was more. And this shaman knew something about it. Once more, the Peculiar Raven was overtaken with his peculiar ravening hunger, the hunger to know.
People in this village didn’t die anywhere near as frequently as the Peculiar Raven would have preferred. Without being able to communicate directly with these humans, the best he could manage was to extrapolate his own theories based on the strange things he saw or heard. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done, especially when a body
only showed up once every couple of weeks.
There was a younger man who visited more often than most, a student perhaps, the Peculiar Raven believed. The old shaman appeared to be teaching him the secrets of death. It was clear the elder sensed his time was near, that there was very little time remaining to pass on his knowledge. But the younger man didn’t share the same urgency. He slacked off on his studies and showed up rarely, even on the regrettably rare occasion when there were bodies to be tended.
Quite frankly, the Peculiar Raven preferred when the younger man stayed away, it was easier to watch what the old shaman was doing when that smug voice wasn’t constantly questioning and getting in the way of the important parts. But no matter how much he watched, no matter how much he thought he learned, the raven never seemed to find the secret he was after.
He found the light again for certain. That was one great accomplishment. It was part of the old man’s rituals. He drew the light out of the recently deceased. But unfortunately, the Peculiar Raven never got to taste it, for the shaman would wave his hands and send it away immediately in that strange shimmering blur, which the raven saw the first time. And that disappointed him greatly.
By the sixth funeral service, the Peculiar Raven was growing rather perturbed by his inability to find out the old man’s secret. But, even worse still, he could tell by the pallid grey tone of his flesh and the darkness around his lips that the times of his teaching were soon to be over. The Peculiar Raven’s chance to learn the secrets of death was running out.
The shaman’s death was perhaps the strangest death of a creature the Peculiar Raven ever saw. Of course, he never watched any creature for so long or learned so much about any individual long enough to develop much of a sense of them. But this old man, despite the distance and absence of any connection between bird and human, affected the Peculiar Raven, adding to his peculiarity. He marveled at that moment how he might even be the very first raven to have an actual emotion for something dead that wasn’t hunger.
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