Relics and Realms - Issue 11 - Moravia
Moravia. The very utterance of the name rasped against the sanity like a shard of obsidian. It was not a land one visited, but rather a pestilence one endured, a gnawing blight upon the cartographer’s mind that dared not be fully mapped.
Forget the quaint sun-dappled meadows and bucolic hillsides promised by travelogues – those were mere phantoms conjured by minds ill-prepared for the stark truth. Moravia was a wound upon the face of the world, its edges blurred by perpetual twilight. A sky eternally choked with ash-grey clouds wept a pale, anemic moon, casting long, skeletal shadows that writhed like tormented souls across the blighted landscape.
Ruined castles, once sentinels of a forgotten glory, now stood as jagged teeth against a horizon the colour of old bruises. Their hollow sockets stared blindly, haunted by echoes of feasting and unholy rites. Villages huddled together as though for warmth, their muddied streets slick with an unwholesome slickness that spoke of things better left unknown.
The forests themselves were nightmares given form – gnarled behemoths draped in a shroud of perpetual gloom, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers. Within their depths, unseen things stirred. The rustle of leaves hid whispers not borne of wind, but of something older, hungrier… something that yearned for the taste of mortal terror.
Moravia. The very utterance of the name rasped against the sanity like a shard of obsidian. It was not a land one visited, but rather a pestilence one endured, a gnawing blight upon the cartographer’s mind that dared not be fully mapped.
Forget the quaint sun-dappled meadows and bucolic hillsides promised by travelogues – those were mere phantoms conjured by minds ill-prepared for the stark truth. Moravia was a wound upon the face of the world, its edges blurred by perpetual twilight. A sky eternally choked with ash-grey clouds wept a pale, anemic moon, casting long, skeletal shadows that writhed like tormented souls across the blighted landscape.
Ruined castles, once sentinels of a forgotten glory, now stood as jagged teeth against a horizon the colour of old bruises. Their hollow sockets stared blindly, haunted by echoes of feasting and unholy rites. Villages huddled together as though for warmth, their muddied streets slick with an unwholesome slickness that spoke of things better left unknown.
The forests themselves were nightmares given form – gnarled behemoths draped in a shroud of perpetual gloom, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers. Within their depths, unseen things stirred. The rustle of leaves hid whispers not borne of wind, but of something older, hungrier… something that yearned for the taste of mortal terror.
Moravia. The very utterance of the name rasped against the sanity like a shard of obsidian. It was not a land one visited, but rather a pestilence one endured, a gnawing blight upon the cartographer’s mind that dared not be fully mapped.
Forget the quaint sun-dappled meadows and bucolic hillsides promised by travelogues – those were mere phantoms conjured by minds ill-prepared for the stark truth. Moravia was a wound upon the face of the world, its edges blurred by perpetual twilight. A sky eternally choked with ash-grey clouds wept a pale, anemic moon, casting long, skeletal shadows that writhed like tormented souls across the blighted landscape.
Ruined castles, once sentinels of a forgotten glory, now stood as jagged teeth against a horizon the colour of old bruises. Their hollow sockets stared blindly, haunted by echoes of feasting and unholy rites. Villages huddled together as though for warmth, their muddied streets slick with an unwholesome slickness that spoke of things better left unknown.
The forests themselves were nightmares given form – gnarled behemoths draped in a shroud of perpetual gloom, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers. Within their depths, unseen things stirred. The rustle of leaves hid whispers not borne of wind, but of something older, hungrier… something that yearned for the taste of mortal terror.