O Silencio

Everything is quiet. There is no sound, no movement. There are trees, but their branches do not move, and that feels strange. There are no animals. The grass is still. You can feel it in your bones, how things are... wrong. Everything is inert, frozen in time, frozen in place. It's empty, it's grey, it's a void.

It is waiting.

There's movement in the corner of your eyes, just out of sight. A shadow. You turn and there's nothing there. There's a whisper by your ear, a shiver runs down your spine, fear rushes up. But you turn, and there's nothing there. There can't be, all is quiet. There is no sound in this desolate place, there is nothing, even the trees are nothing, just there, their bark looking darker the more you look at them, like black holes, slits in the fabric of the universe. Their leaves are black, bottomless eyes watching you.

Something brushes against your arm.

It's playing with your mind, making your fear its ball of yarn, tapping and patting it, bouncing it around until it's a mess of tangled thread that you cannot possibly unravel. There is no one there to touch you, to whisper in your ear, to rush from behind a tree and run towards you to tear you apart, rip your lungs out, turn your ribs inside out, hollow your eyes, and--

No. There is no one there. There's nothing there.

But if there's nothing there, then... who is talking to you? Who's whispering sweet nothings, tempting you into the darkness? Your hair stands on end and yet you can't resist the pull towards... something. You're surrounded by trees, an expanse painted all in grey, in black. And it's getting closer. Darker and darker. It's closing in on you. And yet you walk as if you're being called by something, someone. So you walk until the end, until there's nothing more. Because O Silencio is nothing if not that. The end. There is nothing you can do now that you have found yourself in this dismal place. Perhaps you want to run. Perhaps you want to scream, fight, do anything. Maybe you even should. There's a feeling that something is about to happen, an imminent doom, that there's something there about to pounce on you. They're just behind you. A monster waiting in the shadows, waiting patiently, while your fear is humming like a string about to break, buzzing like your lungs are full to the brim with bees, about to burst. But in the end, there's nothing to do. There's nothing. But it still comes for you. There is fear, it embraces you. There is darkness. You're empty, you're grey, you're a void. No more waiting.

The end.

A Place of Death and Desolation

As much as O Silencio sounds like a story to scare naughty children, it is very much a real place. The stories of what happens there might be the product of imagination - if a terribly macabre one - but it is a place one can pinpoint on a map. It sits somewhere between the lands of the Summer and the Winter Courts territory, a forest covered in fog. It looks harmless, but if people have lived nearby for long enough they know. Most know its general location, know all the best ways to avoid it, but no one has ever wanted to map its limits exactly. Because if you wander too close to it, to that grey blotch on the map, if you brush the fog by accident because it crept on you in the night, suddenly you'll find yourself in it, lost in its fields of despair, and then it will be too late. There have been some accounts of people who have managed to return, although they do not remember how. They seem fine. Mostly. It's best not to look too closely. Perhaps they are true, perhaps they are not. It is hard to tell if there is anything there at all, a terrible creature who pursues people and terrifies them, taking their last breaths from them, or if the land just consumes people, erases them from existence. No one has ever heard anything. Or seen it. People have watched from afar as someone went in, and then rose up in the air, seemingly in a blissful state, and then... Nothing. Others walked in, and walked, and walked, and walked... ... Nothing. That word has been going around a lot. People would rather there was nothing there. Or perhaps that there was everything there, because at least then they would have an explanation, something they could point towards and blame. But there's nothing of the sort. People merely know not to wander into O Silencio. No one ever comes back. And the ones who do... perhaps you shouldn't trust them. Why would they have survived? How? What did they do? What are they? There are all sorts of madness in the Feywild, all sorts of minds. But they all know you do not wander into O Silencio. You do not go near it. If you do, that's the end of the line. The end of everything, the beginning of nothing.

It is waiting.