Interactive Quest of lines across throats,

It is near the pitch of night, when twilight turns to black. It is an eerie light. It is the light where shadows creep and crawl and when one’s eyes can barely see and what they can see is nothing like the world they know.

In the midst of Tinea Swamp, a line of raging torches line a clearing, casting dancing light onto the ground. At the base of their tall stands, all the Ilati stand. They are part shadow and part bone. The Swamp’s dark swallows them near whole. But for the gleam of torchlight that shines upon bone and feather and wicked sharp sticks that adorn the Ilati shamans.

Their masks are monstrous things to behold: skulls, those of normal animals and those of mythical beasts that might have lived and died a thousand years ago. Scribes carve this night’s story into the hard flesh of the surrounding trees. The stories glow in white and seem to move as the firelight passes over them, breathing life into their white lines. Shamans stamp their feet into the stagnant pools and all the air is filled with smoke and dank and wicked, wild magic.

Stomp and hiss.

Stomp and hiss.

Over and over the water sprays and settles as hundreds of feet stamp it into submission. Soon the water is thick as mud and still those drumming feet do not stop, but wear the mud like finest cloth – a reminder that they are of the earth.

At the head of the clearing, the point to which all the torches point (like a pyramid), stands a black girl with a behemoth’s half skull. It obscures her face and veils her eyes. They only gleam when the light slips in. Great horns rise from the carnivore skull and reach like spiraling spikes, up into the night. Before this Witch Doctor is an empty wooden bowl. She looks down the clearing and waits for her successor to appear.

From her lips a chant vibrates, loud as a hum. It welcomes the new Witch Doctor forward and when Sigrun appears, the old Witch Doctor draws a jagged obsidian blade down her throat. It is a cut enough to bleed and yet not enough to kill – for the Witch Doctor’s are holy beings. But this is a time for a changeover, this is a succession, one to be marked in blood and fire.

Above the Witch Doctor hangs a great skull with runes that stretch, twilight dark across its ivory surface. It is a beautiful skull, fearsome but wondrous. Its black orbits watch over the proceedings and the Witch Doctor who gathers her blood into the cup.

“Come, Sigrun,” The Witch Doctor welcomes. “Come and claim the magic Vespera gives us.” To add her blood into the bowl, to mix old and new Witch Doctor’s lifeblood together, to pour it upon the great skull that hangs above, will be enough to call down the Witch Doctor’s magic from one girl onto the next.