S K U L L   R A V E N S

These are no ordinary birds.

They're a cross between vultures and eagles … ugly things, big, intimidating, but they don't feed on carrion. They like thoughts and dreams. And they have hooked beaks ideal for pecking into a sleeping traveller's temple, opening the skin and chipping through the skull, sucking out their dreams and flying away just as the sleeper awakes, a shadow in the night.

Years ago, before the Cataclysmic War, it's said that rich people used to keep skull ravens as pets, watching them feed on sleeping servants for sport. How true this is, it's difficult to say. Perhaps it explains why the skull ravens now seem to mock humanity wherever they find it..

They rarely share their food … but sometimes, if someone knows just the right things to say and the way to say it, the skull ravens can be used to carry messages. Whether they're trustworthy or not has never been decided. They really are the last resort.

Hope the witch, a character in DUSK, has cause to use to skull ravens when her situation is dire. She knows the words, she knows how to speak them, but even she has no idea of how the skull ravens may blur her desperate message …

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