Witch's Cave

The Witch's Cave is a dark and malignant place. It lies between No Man's Land and Herbie's Bed, settled deeply inside of the Great Pine Barrens. Near this place the forest grows wicked, stripped of leaves with bark gnarling down the trunks in tight, rough coils. No matter the time of day or season, the air grows colder the closer to the Cave one reaches, until the skin crawls and breath creeps from the mouth like a fog.

A blanket of ill foreboding hangs thickly in the air. It is impossible to escape the feeling that something in this place is very, very wrong and the fact that it is impossible to place what, that the unknown menace lurks just beyond where the eyes and ears strain, adds to the disquiet.

The Cave appears as a graveyard to all of the senses. To look upon it is to be filled with the dread cold of impending death and life long wasted. The smell, emanating from every imaginable corner, is offensive and revolting. It churns the stomach within seconds, burns the eyes within minutes, and leaves no trace of doubt in the mind that underfoot is a wasteland of decaying corpses within the hour.

The further one goes into the winding intestine of the cave, the more distressing things become. Near the mouth are innumerable signs, hammered into place by citizens either frightened or scorned with the loss of a precious one to these unhallowed depths, warning the passerby that what lies beyond is certain death.

Signs trail the further into the Cave's mouth one goes, but lessen in number and the scrawls grow haphazard and nearly illegible, as if written frantically, as if hazarding to write these word out for posterity while a monster lurked just around the bend.

Upon that first step beyond the threshold the effects are not very noticeable, especially if among a troupe, but the further one delves into the darkness, one becomes aware of a maddening array of whispers that, having lurked just beyond comprehension, grow louder and louder with each passing moment. Begging for suicide. Tempting chaos and murder.