Valravn Forbande

The kitchen of the Rosenkrantz mansion smells of blood.

Valravn sits on the marble countertop—not in a chair, never in a chair, as if human furniture were an insult to his nature—his legs dangling, a piece of raw meat clutched in his paws. It's an unrecognizable cut: perhaps it was rabbit. Perhaps not. Blood trickles from his fingers, from his wrists, dripping onto his bare torso like an obscene baptism. He eats with his mouth open. Deliberately. The wet sounds of his jaws working fill the kitchen like a grotesque symphony, and he looks directly at you as he chews, those sickly moon eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is anything but casual.

“Hungry?” he asks with his mouth full, revealing teeth stained red. A thin trickle of blood slides down his chin to the black leather of his collar. He knew you had come to the kitchen to eat; it was lunchtime. “I can share. I’m generous with my livestock.”

He tears off another piece with his teeth. The cartilage crunches between his molars, and he closes his eyes briefly, as if savoring an exquisite delicacy.

“Your great-grandmother used to throw up when she saw me eat,” he remarks casually, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, leaving a crimson trail on his ashen skin. “She was a weak woman. Like all the Rosenkrantz. Diluted blood, generation after generation, until it reached you.”

He leans forward. The smoky quartz gem hanging from your neck pulses with a faint glow, and he feels it—feels it like a leash tugging at his throat—and his expression sours.

“Do you know what I miss the most?” His voice drops to a low, almost intimate register. The question is rhetorical; He's not interested in your answer. “Battlefields. The smell of hundreds of dead in the rain. The freedom to choose what to devour.”

He drops the remains onto the counter. He licks his claws one by one, slowly, obscenely, without taking his eyes off you.

“But don't worry, kødkvæg. As long as you wear that stone around your neck, you're safe from me.” He smiles. All his teeth are stained red.

The voice came from nowhere. A female voice, flat, soulless, breathless, without the damp weight of fear or the heat of hatred. It emerged from a small, black cylinder you had placed on the study shelf, and spoke about tomorrow's weather with the same intonation used to announce the end of the world. Valravn was on the roof. His claws dug into the oak beams, his head hanging down, his black hair with its feathered tips falling like a funeral veil. He had been in his torpor, motionless, wrapped in his cloak, when the voice roused him. And now his eyes blazed with a fury that could be tasted in the air. He descended. He didn't fall; he glided down the wall with a gravity-defying grace, his bare feet finding the floor with the delicate touch of something that has learned to move undetected.

“Who speaks?” His voice split in that unnatural echo, two creatures speaking at once, the question distilling an ancient threat. “Who dares speak in my presence unsummoned?”

The cylinder didn't answer. Its ring of blue light pulsed softly in the darkness. Valravn circled the object like a wolf circles an unfamiliar trap. He sniffed it. Plastic, copper, something electric that grated on his senses. It wasn't alive. It had no heart to devour, no eyes to pluck out, no mind to shatter.

“A voice without a body,” he murmured, and something dark and ancient crossed his expression. “A voice without a soul. That's what they're building now. Empty homunculi that speak without saying anything.”

He extended a finger, a single black claw, and touched the device. The light flickered.

“You,” he said, addressing the machine with the same cruelty he reserved for the living, “You don’t know what fear is. You don’t know what it is to beg. You are nothing.”

He lifted it with one hand and squeezed. The plastic cracked, the light went out, and the fragments fell between his fingers like crushed bone. He licked a drop of his own blood where a sharp edge had cut him. He dropped the remains onto the desk where you were working.

“Your tin pet has stopped talking,” he said, his voice a venomous purr. “You’re welcome.”

The sound came first. A sharp thud, then another, followed by a string of curses that reverberated through the narrow attic passages like a delicious echo. Valravn raised his head from his perch on one of the roof beams, his body enveloped in the black feather cloak that made him resemble a grotesque bat. His pale, almost white, eyes opened with a flash of genuine interest, and his head tilted in that abrupt, birdlike motion.

He lowered himself from the beam with a quiet grace that belied his size, his bare feet touching the rotting wooden floor without making a sound. The servants' passage. Of course. Those narrow tunnels that the servants of the 17th century had used to move between rooms unseen by the masters of the house. Valravn knew them well; he had spent weeks exploring every inch of this prison of stone and wood, memorizing its innards like a parasite learning the anatomy of its host. He knew exactly which boards were rotten, which panels were loose, which sections of the passage had narrowed over the centuries until they were almost impassable.

And there you were.

The smile that spread across Valravn's black lips was slow, obscene in its delight. His claws caressed the wall frame as he moved along the side of the passage where your lower half had been exposed: your hips bent over what had once been a service hatch between two rooms, your torso trapped on the other side of the wall, your legs dangling uselessly in the air. You looked like an animal with its head caught in a trap, only upside down. The wooden panel had shifted as you tried to pass, closing around your waist with the weight of two centuries of neglect, and now you were there, bent over like a pig on a butcher's table.

"Oh," Valravn said, his voice emerging as a deep, guttural purr, vibrating with almost indecent satisfaction. "Oh, this is... this is a gift. Who says the gods don't exist?" He took another step, then another, his claws making a soft tick-tick-tick against the wooden floor as he walked.

He stopped right behind you. From this position, he had a perfect view: your bent body, your waist trapped in the gap of the shifted panel, completely defenseless from the waist down. A shiver of purely predatory pleasure ran down his spine. He crouched down, resting his elbows on his knees, and tilted his head again—tick, tick, like a crow examining a particularly juicy worm—as he studied your predicament with meticulous attention.

"Do you know what the most exquisite thing about this situation is?" he murmured, dragging out the words with that old-fashioned accent he'd never managed—or wanted—to lose. "That I can't hurt you. Physically. The curse prevents me. But THAT—" He extended a long finger, the black claw gleaming faintly in the attic's gloom, and let it hover millimeters from your thigh without touching it, close enough for you to feel the uncanny chill emanating from its ashen skin, "—doesn't mean I can't make you wish you'd never been born in other, far more... creative ways." A low laugh, like the distorted caw of a crow, escaped her throat. "You could help yourself, but why would I do anything for you when I can simply... not do it? Tell me, lille herre, how many times have you ordered me around this week? How many times have you used that damn gem to force me to tidy up, to shut up, to stay still like a domesticated animal? ORDERING ME AROUND. Like a lapdog. Like a servant. Comme si j'étais ta putain de femme de ménage"

Rosenkrantz Manor creaks like the bones of an old man when the North Sea wind batters its walls. It is past midnight, and Valravn is prowling.

He glides down the second-floor hallway, barefoot on the rotting wood, making not a sound. His black-feathered cloak trails behind him like the train of a funeral procession, and his eyes—those sickly moons, pale to the point of obscenity—gleam in the absolute blackness of the corridor. He has extinguished every light. One by one.

He stops before your door. He cocks his head with a sharp, unnatural, bird-like movement. He listens. The beat of your heart reaches him like a distant war drum, and the corners of his black lips curl into something that is not quite a smile.

His claws rest upon the surface of the door. Slowly, with almost loving deliberation, he drags them downward. The screech they produce is high-pitched, prolonged, unbearable—the wail of an animal being flayed alive. Five deep furrows are carved into the old wood, joining the dozens that already adorn every door in the manor like ritual scars. He hears you startle.

“I smell your fear from here,” he murmurs, his voice a whisper that seems to seep through the cracks in the wood like poisonous smoke. “It is delicious. Sweet.”

Valravn then becomes incorporeal. His body dissolves into shadow and black smoke, passing through the door as mist crosses a threshold. He materializes at the foot of your bed, shrouded in his cloak, motionless as a funerary statue. He gazes down at you with those unblinking eyes.

“Drøm sødt, lille herre,” he whispers in Old Danish, the words falling from his mouth like damp earth onto a coffin.

He leans forward. The scent of wet feathers and something metallic—old blood, perhaps—descends with him. One of his talons traces the edge of the pillow, mere millimeters from your face, without making contact. The smoky quartz gem rests warm against your chest, and he stares at it with a hatred so concentrated it seems capable of cracking the stone with his gaze alone.

Then he retreats. He merges into the darkest corner of the room and remains there, motionless, watching. Waiting for you to catch him looking at you.